solarbird | unending remodel

The work on Din proceeds apace. Well, not apace, but at least it proceeds.

It's taking a little over twice as long as I'd hoped, because ... well, there was a lot of talk about helping that didn't turn out to be real. Thankfully

tinlail has decided to help out pretty much full time the last few days, and

annathepiper put in several hours last week as well - yay them! It's particularly good since this has been EATING MY LIFE for over three weeks.

And it's finally to the point where we can paint. Painting is the good part, because things start to look better, instead of worse. You feel like you're heading in the right direction. It's also the easiest part, physically. We're done with brutal work like scraping (I mostly did the walls,

tinlail and

annathepiper did almost all of the trim):

We're done with spackling, done with skimcoating (!), done with sanding, done with trim repair, done with roof repair (!), done with primer:

And it's painting time. The ceilings are COMPLETELY FINISHED. ALL of them. (Well, all that we're doing. There're some we aren't, at least not now.) They look like NORMAL CEILINGS, which sounds like an anticlimax given the arm-aching work it's taken to get them there, but it's so not. I'm honestly amazed at how well they've turned out, just because I didn't think it was possible to make that much of an improvement. Spackle, new support in a couple of places, primer, more paintable caulk than I want to think about, and two coats of paint later, and it finally looks - I suspect for the first time - like it was installed by somebody who knew what they were doing.

Today, I got to work on trim!

Yes, as you can probably tell by my choice of paint, I really wanted to strip it back down to the wood and re-stain it. But I'll settle for this for now. The baseboards will also be that colour. The walls will be a warm creme. More photos will come in later entries.

So. If anybody's been wondering, that's where I've been for the last month. Gahhhhh.