Good news and bad news…

 

 

The good and bad news is that Stephanie is now a week overdue.  While it’s been helpful to have all these extra weekends to work on the upstairs, enough is enough!  She is definitely ready for the baby to come out now.  Yesterday and today I worked on finish coats for the trim, paint edging and cleaning up.  While there are still a lot of areas that need further touch up, the rooms are looking REALLY good.  We had taken pictures earlier today but then retook them at night to really show how nice things are looking.  During the day, the mix of lighting is not as flattering and a lot of the details are lost in shadows.  At night the lighting is much more even, which I guess really means that we did a really good job planning out our lights (OK, really we were just lucky).

Getting all the paper out from under the base shoe was a real daytime nightmare.  I suppose there is some trick that professional painters use, but I sure don’t know what it is.  After 4-5 coats of primer and paint, the base shoe and paper had become one.  I ended up having to use a utility knife to score them apart, which sounds much easier and faster than it really was.  It probably took me at least two hours to remove all the paper.  And while I usually try to do everything by hand and without masking, there was no good way to get paint on the base shoe and not the floor.  I know that everyone’s thinking “well, why not paint the base shoe before installing it?”  And yes, that would’ve been a good idea, but I had so much other unpainted trim (sills, separator beads) that I just didn’t want to be bothered.  Sometimes you get on a roll and don’t want to be slowed down by such tings.  Of course, all I did was defer one lousy job for an even worse one.  Not only was the paper hard to remove, it was even harder to slide get it under the base shoe in the first place (I wasn’t going to settle for a sloppy masking tape line!).  This is how I do so many of my jobs…bounce back and forth between two methods that I don’t like, always thinking that the other one would’ve worked so much better.  There’s always next time.  Regardless of my construction inefficiencies, I’m really happy with the way it’s turning out.