Painting

We painted today. Grace had been applying primer and painting the ceiling white over the course of the week, but today we painted the bedroom walls. It's only the first coat but it looks good. (Best part - it only took about an hour and now we can't do anything else in there for the rest of the weekend!)

One important thing that we learned was that high quality paint significantly reduces the quantity of paint that you need. We bought five gallons of paint and we finished the closet and bedroom walls with only one gallon (and the first coat takes more paint than the second.) So if anyone out there needs two, possibly three, gallons of Behr paint for cheap let us know. It's a neat color (the picture doesn't really do it justice). It's called "Toasted Almond" which, of course, tells no one anything about what color it actually is but that's what it's called. We thought that since we love both toast and almonds that this color would be great.

Texturing

The texturing of the bedroom and closet is finished! In spite of what the pictures seem to imply, the bulk of it was done by someone else. A friend from work came over yesterday and textured the whole closet and the bedroom walls, but then we ran out of texture (and we came dangerously close to running out of beer since another friend from work came over too...). We finished off the ceiling this morning and it looks great. The look we went for was a favorite of ours, the ever popular "however it came out" and we nailed it!

The bathroom wasn't quite ready so we hope to finish that early next week.

Here's a picture of Grace scraping the last of the mud into the hopper. We mixed just enough to do the ceiling.

And here's one of me spraying the stuff on to the ceiling.
Kind of a cool process...

Sanding

I spent the day sanding drywall. Every square inch of me has a layer of drywall dust on it. My arms are about ready to fall off. (We used quick-set, super hardening mud on the ceiling - very durable, very difficult to sand...). Grace will put a final finish coat on tomorrow, then one more "quick sanding" and then we hope to texture next Friday.

Daniel McGinn

Daniel McGinn is the author of a disturbingly entertaining book about all things relating to real estate. He's a journalist for Newsweek. The book isn't particularly scholarly but it's not fiction either. If you watch more than two real estate shows on HGTV per week, or if you have ever gone to a real estate open house with absolutely no intention of buying, or if you compulsively grab the free real estate listing books at the grocery store - you should read this book.