Fresh coats

On the list it only reads "putty screw holes in the attic hatch" but what it really means is "put a quality paint on all of the window trim, doors, and baseboards in the living room and dining room." And to that I unofficially added "scrape old paint off all the glass" and Erika added "scrape old paint off the floors around the baseboards."

We chose a nice quality semi-gloss paint in "delicate white," all colors gleamin' in the spectrum. Scraping paint off the window panes with a putty knife takes a while. You do the inside, then do the outside which reveals spots you missed inside. You get those, then you see spots you missed outside. And so on. After scraping the dining room windows, I washed them inside and out.

We washed all the white wood, Erika scraped the paint off the floors, and we got down to painting. The old paint is so dingy. It looks gray compared to the fresh coats. We got two coats on the dining room over the weekend.

Holy cow, what a difference! (And now you can actually see that our walls are "onion powder" and not white!



Erika has been working on the living room this week, as well. Check out the difference...new paint on the right, old on the left. Sorry, sorta dark and blurry...



The other improvement/accomplishment was finally making and installing the ceiling plate for the dining room chandelier. We've had this old brass dish serving as a candle holder for well over a year. We actually bought it for the purpose of making a ceiling plate one day. After a couple of false starts (poor design on my part), I figured it out. Just needed to buy a hollow threaded rod and hooped nut thing (sorry, but I hate saying "nipples and nuts"), and a threaded cross plate for the junction box. We also decided to spray paint it a flat brown/lavender which matches the wood grains and other things in the house. The brass as it was clashed with the copper chandelier.

- John