Huzzah!

I woke up early this morning (7:23) and didn’t fall back to sleep. Very unusual, but I decided to get up and just get working on the room in the morning light. Two times around all of the edges with the brush, and a second coat all around with the roller, and now the priming is done in the family room! Yay!

Even the edges are all crisp and white instead of drywall color or bleeding-though blue!

The room is 24½’x17’, with 6 windows, two sets of double doors, a bump-out, an extra-tall brick fireplace, and a cathedral ceiling, so I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to be done with ALL of that edging.

Of course, the priming isn’t entirely done. After all of the work of mounting the second layer of drywall and carefully cutting out holes for the thermostat and the ugly, ancient electrical heater, Kevin thought about it all a little bit more and proposed removing the heater entirely. Yay! I loved the idea. It’s on the same circuit as way too many other things, and the obvious amateur wiring has always made us skittish. Too bad we didn’t think of taking it out before Kevin made all the cuts, though. 🙁 So he’s patched the wall, and there are still another two coats of joint compound before it’s ready for texture and then primer. Still, that’s one little rectangle that can be taken care of in 3 seconds with a roller. We’re getting there!

The priming took all morning, and then I spent the afternoon doing errands, including trips to both Home Depot (for paint samples) and Lowes (for the carpet sample). The light was too low to make accurate color decisions by the time I got back, so that will be the first thing on the docket for tomorrow. Then back to Lowes to return the carpet sample, and back to Home Depot to actually buy the paint.

While I was gone, Kevin completed the hardware store trifecta by heading over to Ace Hardware to look for insulating foam (they didn’t have it). Our new fire door for the garage/laundry room finally came in earlier in the week. We were planning to replace it anyway, due to the ugliness of the old one, and then our timing got accelerated a bit when the ironing board accidently fell from next to the washing machine while Kevin’s family was here. The ironing board effectively jammed the door to the house closed, and so Kevin and his dad had to break in from the garage through the deadbolt, since we don’t have a key to that lock. The new door, then, is an exciting addition. Kevin broke out his favourite home improvement tools (the crowbar and the big rubber mallet) to remove the old door and frame, and was amused when he removed the trim to find this:

See the empty gaps all the way around the door? No wonder it’s been so cold in that room!! Usually you put insulation around the door, but they’d only put trim (which wasn’t even sealed or caulked). And no wonder all of the weather proofing attempts for the bottom of the door didn’t seem to have any effect! 🙂