Working on the House

September 25th -28th (Friday to Monday) 

During our time off, since the weather was so wet, we worked on stuff inside the house.  First we finished cleaning the areas that we wanted to focus on, which were the hallway, living room, dining room, and kitchen.  We repaired some cracks and holes that were in the walls, and we secured some of the ceiling panels that were starting to droop down.  Then we started with painting the ceiling.  When we had cleaned the ceiling we had gotten a lot of dirt off, but it was amazing how much nicer everything looked right away with a fresh coat of white paint.  

We put on two coats on the ceilings, and then they were done.  

The walls in the hallway were a dark red colour, and it was too dark for such a small area with little light; it was way too much.  

In order to cover over the dark colour we had to do two coats of primer.  Even though it was just the primer, the hallway area immediately looked so much better and so much brighter. 

We worked on putting the two coats of topcoat gloss white onto the doors and trim, and then applied two coats of the beige wall colour.  It looked so much better.  

We did not get as much done as we had originally hoped to, but the place looked way better and we were happy with our progress.  Projects always seem to take longer than we want them to with all of the different steps, and with all of the cutting in of paint around the edges, ceiling, floor, and nine doorways in the hallway, it was quite time consuming.  

Because it was so cool outside, and because we were painting inside, we had our fire going throughout the day each day.  Luckily we had cleaned our chimney on an evening after work the previous week before the rain started.  

Our chimney was so full of soot that after Jason finally managed to work the brush up and down, and up and down, and up and down, all of the way to the bottom, and until the brush was running smoothly, we pulled out a full 5 gallon bucket of creosote.  

One thing that we learned, thanks to the internet, is that ashes are naturally the perfect roughness to remove the soot build-up that clouds over the window on a fireplace.  I read about it, and tried dipping a damp piece of paper towel into the ashes and then used that to scrub the window clean.  It worked perfectly.  I remember when I was a kid that we had a paste in a container that we used on a damp rag to clean the window.  I was looking for this paste to buy at Canadian Tire or some place, but couldn’t find the same stuff.  In looking, I read about the ashes trick, and it worked great.  No need to buy a special cleaner.