One Month To Paint ONE Room? Yes, Please!

Arg fargl, the den is done.

Of course, I still need to rip off the last of the blue painter's tape and install the doorknob...

Oh, and unpack all the books...

And the desk placement is temporary and nothing is on the walls but one clock...

And the windows need some kind of drapery...

Shit. I ain't done, am I?

Bleah. Meanwhile, juniper death marches on! Today's Juniper Mystery Trash Surprises: a softball, a dog toy, yellow rope and the Mt. Everest of trash...including a McDonald's styrofoam Chicken Nuggets container, which they quit using in 1990. Pretty bad when the junipers are eating fast food. No wonder they are so damned big, they bullied someone into feeding them.

Now with fun 'before' and 'after' shots!

Back yard before, last June-overgrown and nasty...we were just starting that day to hack away at the damned junipers:

And after!

The ones along this side of the back fence are gone! Gimanderous brush pile will be hauled away to the back part of the property, where the local wild quail are loving it.

Half of the junipers on this side are gone, the rest fall today. I did find an Ouroborosian growth in the base of the things--a huge branch that came up and then dove back down into the earth, ending who knows where. Presumably gone to visit his buddy Chthulu. I'll bet there's some guy in China ripping out junipers and cussing them. Also a board with rusty nails sticking out of it. Haha, stupid junipers, bringing a board-and-nails to a chainsaw fight...

The giant rocks are awesome and will stay. Next to giant awesome rocks is a cutting from the Curly Willow plant that I brought from the old house, the one we had in the back yard there got massive, was gorgeous and made for great cover for the chickens, and was edible for them as well. Eventually the chickens will be able to roam this part of the yard, once I repair some holes in the chain link caused by the previous tenant's horses. It'll make the chickens so happy to be able to come up to the back of the house again!

Side fence before, the junipers had, needless to say, grown through the fence everywhere:

After! Well...partially. Just wresting them free of the fence and getting them to this point was a major accomplishment:

We trimmed these away from the fence first and discovered that when we did that, it exposed the vulnerable underbelly of the damn junipers and made it easy to attack them from the rear & chop 'em out. Yeah, baby!

Back fence before:

And after!

We're thinking of making the old water heater in the background into a doghouse for Dusty, cutting it up to resemble an old-time Saturn rocket and painting 'Dogstar 1' or something equally goofy on it. Next to the big rocks, where we took out the first juniper, I plan on installing a small pond. That big bastard in the background will be the next one to go after today. Nothing left along the back fence in the foreground but the plant bases and roots, yay!

...which I will now have to dig out.

To quote Scarlett O'Hara, 'I won't think about that today, I'll think about it tomorrow.'

Today's Hellmouth Offerings!

Two projects still underway, one nearing completion and that's the den painting. Last wall!
Before:

Ignore the pistachio green around the wall outlet, that was a horribly failed color choice which I will not use, yikes.

The heavy duty repair job I had to do where some addlepated person had attempted (and failed, by the looks of things) to hang heavy 70's shelves.

Today was just wall sanding/washing, tomorrow will be the start of painting weather permitting.

Other project is just getting underway, the removal of about 20 juniper bushes in the back yard, all of which have been in place since the 70's and are horribly overgrown. Today's chainsawing gave us this:

A truly gigantic brush pile that the kid and I moved into the very back of the yard for removal another day.

After! I can see the chicken coop, yay!

Today's juniper offerings, a metal fence post, a chunk of angle iron and a full tube of sunscreen, plus two small dog toy-type balls.

Also, this!

It's the base of ONE of the plants and is as tall as my kid.

It was chanting "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn", whatever that means.

We tossed Cthulhu on the burn pile with the rest of his buddies, screw him.

Progress...

OK, the den painting is never going to get done, despite me actually PAINTING the thrice damned room. That's how it seems, at any rate. Anyway, today's progress:

This corner and these doors DONE, except for blue painter's tape removal and reinstall of doorknobs & switch plates and whatnot. I'm down to painting the last wall and one door, which means I'll have to shift everything in the room to the opposite wall first. Once that's done I can actually put the room together and have another useable room.

Meanwhile, after threatening it for months and writing a manifesto on Twitter, JUNIPER DEATH.

Before, look at these nasty assholes:

After a thorough chainsawing:

Granted, these two were mostly-dead or all-dead, but I still count it as a victory against crappy, poorly-thought-out-40-years-ago landscaping. The one on the left barfed up a horse sweat scraper and a bunch of wire. I'm gonna save all the crap these things yield up like some Homeowner's Personal Mouth of Hell and get a picture of it all at once. Also I now have to haul off a gazillion pounds of branches.

The chickens can see the house now and get excited when I'm at the kitchen window waving to them.

Today's Paint...

STILL painting the den, for the love of God. It's going excrutiatingly slowly, as my body is gleefully reminding my brain that I'm not 20 anymore and can no longer bite off a job like this and expect to get it done in 1-2 days, haha.

Anyway, these two walls are DONE, trim included. I still have to paint the doors & doorjambs, but it's coming along and the furniture is actually starting to migrate into place.

One wall to go!

Still Painting...

So...yeah, the mint green was unanimously reviled by all, and instead we went with the light brownish color I'd used in the living room.

Much better! Even with just one coat up so far. The blue stuff is my old friend, painter's tape.

It goes well with the very light creamy pinkish-brown trim color used throughout the house, once I get the walls done it'll be next.

Thought I'd get a day off cussing the former tenants, then I spent time replacing the old fugly 70's doorknobs & strike plates. Yikes, the lengths that people go to half-ass something, when doing it right would take just as long...

Den Painting, Still...

So yesterday the dark green wall was finished, windows washed and repaired--they had molted their little nylon rollers--and the blinds rehung.

Next is the rest of the room. Now--we've tried and tried to like it, have applied several coats in test spots...but no, this is just TOO minty, so this light green is out.

I did however get to growl afresh at the previous tenant's painting skills. The gaping hole on the left was where they stuck double sided tape--that thick kind--to the wall and then painted over it. Twice. When my sander hit it, it instantly remelted and spread, making it necessary to attack the wall with a scraper.

Multiple other sander marks are where they just plain glopped on spackle or dripped paint in huge, runny, ohsothick streaks.

On this wall they switched things up a bit--see the double doors?

They painted them, then closed the doors while the paint was still wet. TWICE, for the love of God--I found two different colors of stuck paint!

Who doesn't learn from the first time they have to pry the doors open with a resounding, tearing 'snap'?!

I still have to change the doorknobs, as these are original 1972 Butt Ugly. After this I'll be down to the final wall, huzzah! It'll sure be nice to get past all this and have an office to work out of.

This Week's Project...

...is painting the den. The den is currently a passively-aggressively ugly shade of putty.

I'd already taken down the matching steel blinds, which added to the overall fatal-depression-inducing feel. This particular wall features painted-over paneling, yum. It didn't help that the windows were in dire need of rehab as well. They have since been recaulked and fixed up.

Seriously, the room is the poster child for 'Ugly'.

Now, the thing is...we'd decided to go with green for the den. Growing up as I did in a family where 'Eggshell' is a startling departure from 'Off-White', painting with darker colors is at first a nearly heart-stopping leap of faith. Especially when you have to apply paint to the grooves in the paneling first, which isn't the most attractive thing on Earth.

Yeah. This is the part where that little voice in your head starts screaming, 'What? WHAT?!' and hyperventilating into a brown paper bag. Shut up brain, and trust me.

Things look better after the first coat is done. I'm having to work around the furniture and do one wall at a time. The other walls will be a lighter green, I've got one coat on the one wall and it's lookin' pretty darned minty, we'll see if it darkens down a bit with the second coat.

Even better after the second coat of green is done and the first coat of window trim paint goes up.

Hopefully tomorrow will see the final coat of trim go up, the blue painter's tape removed and the windows washed, 'cause after the winter we've had, boy howdy do they ever need it.

This week's project...

This week it was the area where the living room & dining room meet, with ugly 70's half wall.

Before---
From the living room:

From the dining room:

Ugh. Just could not be uglier. And yes, I broke out some $2 cuss words while patching previous owners screw-ups and attacking the wall with a sander. As usual. What should have been a 1-2 day job took 4. I hate that half-wall with it's nasty 70's woodwork, but at the moment tearing it out wasn't an option, we'd have had to redo the carpet and the dining room floor to patch the hole. So paint it is!

After!

Paint can work miracles!

Living Room DONE!

Dear God, it feels GREAT to have even one room in this house DONE--cleaned, painted and decorated. There is so much to do here that a lot of the time it feels like a 'fish or cut bait' dilemma, we don't know what to do first.

Boring, ugly living room before:

And after!  New wall paint and trim paint, plus the whole 'scrub the fireplace top to bottom and refinish the wood mantle' thing. Also, curtains up and pictures on the walls! The ugly metal blinds are staying for now, since they are mostly covered while raised and will do their job come winter. You can see where I stopped painting, I have to paint one side of the room, then shift all the furniture to the other side before I can paint the opposite walls.

Of course, because of the way this house is constructed, you can't just hang a curtain rod. Oh, no. It is a roaring pain in the ass to hang anything heavier than a very small picture on the walls, you have to find studs, buy special types of hangers, plan for weight distribution...bleah.

But hey, one down!

Except...except for the 'siliconed-shut window' thing courtesy of the previous tenants, may they rot stinking in Hell for all of eternity. Here's why:

By dint of doing some investigating of the realtor's pictures of the house when it was for sale, we realized the reason for the weird silicone thing--the previous owners had a window air conditioner mounted there and had thought it a GREAT idea to silicone the damned thing into place. A closer look at the 1/2 inch-thick layer of silicone they cheerfully filled the window and it's channels with:

It goes around all three sides of the window and is on the window and the channel. It won't peel off but instead most be laboriously picked at, coming loose in tiny bits & pieces. I worked on it for a few minutes before realizing that it was going to take at least one whole day to get this gunk out of there.

I tell you, I laughed and sang the entire time I worked on it.
Really.
Honest.

Painting Progresses...

Because of how we need to move around furniture and plan ahead on unpacking boxes, painting is progressing rather strangely. The last two days I've concentrated on half of the dining room.

Before, universal boring white.

Although NO shortage of painted-over staples, tape and nailheads thinly covered with spackle...just enough to make you think it's just a spackle glop and run the power sander over it, haha. When this happens the sandpaper tears and makes a truly horrific, loud, rattling noise that is guaranteed to make your heart stop. Even more fun if you are up on a ladder sanding over your head. Added to this kind of fun is having to scrape big glops of painted-over acoustical ceiling bits from the walls & molding. Plus the truly craptacular spackle job from two previous paint jobs--especially where some bonehead used rubberized caulk for spackle and thought it'd work--and you've got yourself a fine recipe for foaming at the mouth and moaning obscenities at the previous tenants.

So yeah, the first day is mostly scrape, repair and scrub. Then came painting, the same Americaunas-egg green for the walls as I used in the kitchen, and a light brown to match the kitchen countertops for the trim.

So far in this room I just did this corner and the wall around the sliding glass door, so that I can move a large cabinet into this corner and hang the sliding door blinds & curtains. The door to the garage will be done later.

Once this is done, I can unpack the boxes in the living room, which will clear THAT room for finishing IT'S paint job.

Meanwhile, it's 100 degrees and time to stop for the day. Oh, and we believe we have a skunk living under the house.

But that's a whole 'nuther adventure involving mothballs placed in Mason jars with holes popped in the lids, then stealthily and *carefully* rolled under the house like Molotov cocktails--all while poised to RUN.