Project’s end
Well, nearly the end. The sunroom still needs its safety railings, and its floor still needs a final coat of polyurethane. But the kitchen is 100% done, and there are no more surfaces that require my attention with a paintbrush.
I must apologize for the lack of updates for the last few weeks. My free time has been devoted to finishing touches — mostly painting — and moving into the new kitchen.
At my last update, we were waiting for the finish coat of polyurethane on the kitchen floors. That did indeed happen, and the contractors cleared out all their tools from the dining room. As Lis was out of town that weekend, I set myself some pretty ambitious goals: scrape the popcorn off the dining room ceiling and repaint it, white-wash the ceiling in the sunroom, and move back into the kitchen.
So-called popcorn is a popular textured ceiling finish — popular, that is, with contractors who would rather not deal with prepping & painting a ceiling, especially one that’s got some surface imperfections. It’s composed of normal drywall compound with bits of vermiculite mixed in (though beware — some popcorn finish applied earlier than the 80’s contains asbestos). It’s sprayed on with a special gun and allowed to dry. It looks fine for a while. Then it starts to pick up dust & stains, and looks terrible. It’s nearly impossible to cut a clean line when painting an adjacent wall. And god help you if you try to paint the popcorn itself: half of it comes off on your roller. When we moved in, every ceiling surface in our entire house was covered with the stuff. The good news is, if it’s never been painted, you can just get it wet and scrape it off with a wide drywall trowel, trying to catch most of it in a paint tray (or whatever). It’s easy to do, except that you’re working on a ladder and it makes a mess. I had previously done most of the ceilings on the first floor, and the new kitchen is smooth-finished. Anyway, I got the popcorn removal done Friday night.
Saturday morning I got to work painting the sunroom ceiling. As we did in Southboro, we wanted a whitewash (also known as pickled) finish. The process is to apply a thinned-down white paint with a brush, and wipe it off with a rag. This finish lightens the wood considerably, while still allowing the grain to come through. To my eye, when done right, it looks like someone has stripped the paint off an old painted surface. Our contractor thoughtfully put up the ceiling boards first, allowing me to do this process without fear of drips ruining the walls or floor. This is more ladder work, but much less messy than the popcorn. You can see my work in progress here:
On Sunday I got started moving into the kitchen. We had done a good job of labeling all our boxes, and so most of the actual work was in carrying them back up from downstairs. I unpacked boxes into rough areas of the kitchen, then started putting things away when I was pretty sure I had most everything. I’m sure we’ll be searching for things for a while, making adjustments over time.
We are very pleased with the entire kitchen. But one thing that’s working out even better than I had imagined is the corner pantry. It just holds so much stuff, and it’s all so visible & accessible.
Somewhere in there I also repainted the half bathroom. This bathroom was one of the first rooms we repainted upon moving in, and we didn’t do nearly enough prep before doing so. Also, changing out the yellow of this room for green freed us to use a different yellow in the kitchen proper.
On Monday I went back to work and was happy for the break 🙂
The following weekend was our kitchen-warming party. While the sunroom was not done (and is still not done as of this writing), we wanted it to be somewhat useable. The contractor got all the electrical work done and got things buttoned up enough that we were able to use the room, even though it did not have the finish floor nor even all the woodwork installed.
The kitchen proved to be everything we had hoped for a party, easily absorbing the 25 or so guests we had at the peak. For a most of the guests, this was the first time seeing our house at all since before construction began, so the transformation was a huge leap. Nobody is going to say that it came out poorly or we made bad decisions, of course, but people’s reactions were good. The biggest surprise for me was a comment I heard from a few people: that this is a much better use of the ex-sunroom space than what we had before — that it was more of just a corridor before — and that the whole first floor seems better connected.
On Sunday (day after the party), Lis painted the outside balusters & posts while I applied a coat of clear polyurethane or white semi-gloss (as appropriate) to every surface in the sunroom except the floor.
Finally, yesterday I caught a break with the weather and was able to get the exterior painting done. I am pleasantly surprised at how much the color scheme helps it tie in with the existing house.
