On The Move

Well, we’re in. Mostly, anyway. Our kitchen is still in Forest Hills along with a lot of clothes and other small stuff, but we’ve been sleeping here since Thursday.

The painting project turned out to be a hell of a lot bigger than we originally thought. When we first talked about the project Debbie and I thought we would just paint the girl’s room and the living room. After we did our second walk-through it became obvious that we couldn’t paint the living room without doing the dining room and the hall, they all flowed together. Then we decided to add the art room. To make matters worse, I had to sand and prime and all the walls; there was a little too much graffiti from the previous residents to just paint over.

Luckily, the ceilings were in good shape. We ended up only having to do the living room and the art room; we never would have gotten it done in time if we had had to paint all the ceilings. We also decided to defer the trim and the interior doors. There was just no way to get all that done in time and there are phone lines and coaxial cable over about 90% of the trim- I’m not sure I can do anything like a decent job with the cables in place. I still have to do the radiators and some of the window frames, but that can all wait until we’re settled.

A few observations: Spending the extra money for Aura, was worth it. Now, the true test of paint is how well it stands up over the years, but it was easy to apply, went on thick and dried very evenly. I had to do some small touch ups and it covered up everything seamlessly. I did a lot of research using painttalk.com a message board for painting contractors. The videos I found on youtube were even more useful. I was able to cut in a lot of the walls without taping. This saved a lot of time, plus tape can sometimes pull off the paint.

I bought a bunch of supplies from thepaintstore.com, and I highly recommend the Corona Shelby Champagne Nylon brushes I bought- 2 ½ inches and tapered, very easy to work with, I could cut a very fine paint line with no effort at all.

Most important of all was the help I got from two great friends, Gary and Helen, I never could have gotten it done without you!!

Will post some pictures as soon as I can find the camera connection.