Walls and Trim

Casa Warwingle, when we acquired it, was coated inside with a thick coat of textured plaster. It had recently been painted, with all-new trim installed. Whoever did it did a really nice job.

Existing trim & plaster.

But Nik hated them. He vowed early on to get rid of as much of it as possible. I wasn't wild about them either - and we had to put new trim and plaster over the moved door anyway. So we decided to do a 'skim coat' of plaster over the whole thing. This would also entail ripping out the existing trim and coming up with something more to Nik's liking.

It turns out, skim-coating plaster is one of the few home improvement skills that's not in Nik's repertoire - so we decided to hire a wonderful plaster specialist named Lazaro, who'd recently done a similar project for a friend of Nik's. To keep the cost down, we would rip off all the existing (freshly-painted, neatly installed) trim ourselves. I'd already learned how to do this in the kitchen, so I got to work.

Bye-bye baseboards...

Lazaro and his crew were amazing: so fast! And so professional. They even worked on stilts!

They did such a good job, we decided to hire them to put up the sheetrock in the kitchen as well. It wasn't in the original budget, but we'd come in under budget on some of the other kitchen items – and Nik was worried we weren't going to stay on schedule without some help. Plus he hates doing sheetrock.

Before: (Nik installed insulation before they started)

After: sheetrocked, taped, and 'mudded' -- ready for priming and painting

Then we had to figure out what we wanted the new trim to look like. We bought some trim pieces from the hardware store and experimented with different thicknesses and arrangements.

The winning arrangement

We ended up choosing a trim combination that felt like it matched the doors but wasn't so grand that it clashed with our modest 8' ceilings.

And then we started painting. That involved more decisions, and more visits to the paint store.

They say paint is cheap – and I guess compared to things like cabinets and electrical it is – but we have easily overspent our painting budget by double already, and we're nowhere near done. I bought three gallons of primer - and we went through it in a week. Nik ran out to buy two more gallons, and they're just about gone. He did another run to pick up some Kilz primer, when three coats of 123 primer still wouldn't cover the icky yellow stains seeping through on the kitchen cabinets.

Painting the existing kitchen cabinets - primer coat #1 of 3.

Painting the dining room.

Painting is a serious workout. After I threw my back out painting the living/dining room ceiling, I got Elliot and his friend to come over and help with the kitchen.

Teenagers hard at work.

Elliot also came by to help Nik install the electrical plugs and light switches.

And voila! It's finally ready now for paint, floors, and cabinets.