Painting, Wallpaper, Good news, Bad news

Fixng up a bomb of a house is always a mixed bag isn't it?

First the good.....

My sister Alison is an expert painter. I called her on Friday night for advice on how to paint baseboards. She went through the whole process (sand, clean, 2 coats of Kilz primer, 1 coat of semigloss). I cracked up when Alison accurately identified herself as a "fussy ass painter"! Oh, how I aspire to acheive such greatness! Thanks Alison! Ted did the sanding/cleaning and we both layed down masking paper on the floor and masking tape around the trim. I did the 2 coats of Kilz yesterday and today will do the coat of white latex.

We're so close to having two of the upstairs rooms done. In our future bedroom, we're painting the baseboards and closet trim, and installing new pine quarter round. We bought the quarter round primed and we'll paint it white, which is the color of the baseboards. We're not going to mess with the walls for now as we suspect that they'll require a fair bit of plaster work. I can live with the Japanese style floral pattern. It's harder to live with the wallpaper in the closet as it's much older and getting pretty nasty. But, once the closet is filled up with clothes, will we really care?

Bedroom Wallpaper



Closet Wallpaper



In the room that will become the den/library, it's pretty much the same deal. We think we'll just clean up the baseboards and install stained pine quarter round. This room features one wall of panelling which we'll paint, and three walls of wallpaper in a shiny floral pattern.

Den/Library Wallpaper



The bad news is the plumbing. When we first moved in, our kitchen sink backed up and the garbage disposal died. Our wonderful handyman Frank took care of it. He wound up fixing the grade of some ot he pipes as he noticed they were travelling uphill at one point. He also removed the backflow preventer from the juncture of the washing machine drain which both he and the washing machine installer indicated to be the wrong size. Which brings us to our current problems. Our drain is clogged somewhere in the basement and kitchen waste is coming out of the washing machine drain. It happened last week and it was like cleaning up vomit (Ted had cleaned out the fridge the night before). But then the drain started working again and we kept a good eye on it. Fast forward to last night. I was enjoying some late night TV when Ted informed me we had water in the basement. Same deal, only the water is much cleaner this week. But, it will not drain. Draino didn't help. Our little drain snake didn't help. The plumber is coming this afternoon. Argh.