This Cold House

Living Room and Dining Room
Post by phil. Filed under Living Room & Dining Room.

Finishing the living room and dining room took much longer than I expected. After working on bits of it over the past several months, it’s finally finished. Before any painting and finishing work was done, the many times textured over ceiling had to be smoothed out and a new texture applied. With the help of my girlfriend Becky, joint compound was used to skim over the existing texture. It took two coats to fill in the roughness and bring the celing back to a smooth finish.

I then used a stomp on type brush with watered down joint compound to apply a crows foot type texture which actually ended up looking more like my own creation because I’m not very skilled. I call it Phil’s foot. Doesn’t sound too difficult, right? Well, in the process of stomping several of the old nails used to secure the drywall strip lathing for the plaster came loose and popped throught the surface of the ceiling. I had to find a way to resecure the ceiling and remove EVERY nail to keep this from continuing. To make a very long story very short, I’ll summarize. I bought some plaster washers (metal rings that provide enough surface to keep from pulling through the plaster) and secured them every few inches between the nails along every joist. After they were installed I pulled all the nails out, patched the holes, ran a strip of mud over the washers, taped over this and then re-skimmed this section of the ceiling. The pictures give a much better explanation of the pain.

After the re-skimming, I restomped texture. Becky primed both ceilings and we were ready to paint.

Becky picked the colors and I have to say that they turned out very nice. All of the rooms in this house that have been re-done get a very non-traditional color. People always tell me that it’ll be harder to sell that way but what’s life without a little color? White is boring. Get some taste.

Again in quick summary, we applied two coats of paint to each color, mounted new baseboard and quarter round to the wall and floor, and touched them up. A new light (which I’ve had in a box for a year!) was installed in the dining room. Completion!