2 coats of paint & 2 faucets

FINALLY got some work done on the house today. The goal for quite some time has been to finish up painting the trim and wainscotting in the bathroom. Today, I finally was able to get the bathroom ceiling, woodwork and wainscotting painted. It looks pretty good, but when I went to remove the blue tape, especially around the window, a bunch of the wall color came up, and the tape had only been on for a few hours. So, went down to the crawl space to get the mostly empty can of the bathroom wall color and touched up the bathroom wall color and also did a little touch up in the laundry room. I still need to paint the trim in the laundry room, but that will be a bit more difficult with the washer and dryer in there, plus all my garden tools. That may wait until spring or at least until I have somewhere to put the tools.

Then, since I'd been crawling around the bathroom floor, I had a look at the faucet on the sink. And, as we had pretty much the whole day to work on things, decided to finally try to put on the new bathroom faucet. The only problem I really had was that it was quite cramped back there behind the sink and the old faucet was attached with metal nuts. One came right off by hand, but the other was more stuck and it took a bit of working on it with pliers before I got it loose enough to remove. Overall, the installation of the faucet was not that hard, but I did not go ahead and install a new pop-up drain at this point in time because I wasn't 100% sure how to remove the old pop-up drain. I also realized that the old drain had not been connected correctly, so technically this whole time we have not had a drain the just pulls like it is supposed to. Who knows, maybe we will tackle the pop-up drain tomorrow or maybe in a few weeks.

The success with the bathroom sink made us brave, so we decided to tackle the kitchen sink. Of course, one of the washers holding the old sink on came off quite easily and the other took some doing. Mom was able to loosen the stuck washer and actually had it about 1/2 the way off and hadn't even realized she got it to budge. The faucet installation again went basically smoothly. We also installed a new sprayer that came with this faucet set. The biggest problem we have had in the kitchen since we moved in is a lack of cold water pressure. Pretty much the cold water has always come out at barely a trickle, so we have essentially only had hot water in the kitchen. This is fine for washing dishes, but not so great for washing hands. Amazingly, installing the new faucet solved the cold water pressure issue. There must have been some sort of clog in the old faucet. If only we had known that this would solve the water pressure issue, we might have tackled this project a few months ago.

So, now I have a bit more room in the dining room closet and two much more attractive, much more period appropriate faucets on my sinks. Tomorrow I am thinking to trying to track down some clothes rods and trying to work on the main closet in my room. I really want to put in double rods, I can really use the extra closet space!


My original plan for Christmas weekend was to paint the kitchen. I had hoped by this point we would have already done the bathroom trim and also have done the laundry room trim and the crown moulding in my bedroom. Well, the laundry room and my bedroom are both going to require moving quite a lot of stuff, so they have been postponed for awhile. I did decide that there would probably be time tomorrow to paint the kitchen. With that in mind, I began taping the kitchen while we were making dinner. I was able to tape most of the kitchen with the tape I had left and just have a little bit to do tomorrow after a trip to Home Depot.

After dinner I thought I would try to edge the kitchen, as we didn't have a roller to do any of the large wall areas. One thing led to another and I ended up brushing the large wall areas as well on two of the walls and edging at least a bit on all 4 walls. There were several areas that were all taped, but needed to be sanded with a heavy grit sandpaper (which of course I couldn't find) and several other areas that still need some more tape. I have decided to leave edging along the ceiling for my mom to do tomorrow.

The final bit of painting I did tonight was to prime the hole in the kitchen were the water heater used to be. The area is mostly out of side, out of mind due to the toaster oven being in that area, but I decided that while I am painting it would be stupid not to at paint that area as well. And this is DEFINITELY an area that needs primer! This area also needs something to block some of the drafts that are coming in as well. We will try to use some of the foam rope we have and maybe some caulk tomorrow to see if we can reduce some of the drafts coming from a round hole in the wall and a much larger than it needs to be hole in the floor around one of the water pipes. Add to that the gap between the floor and the wall between the kitchen and the bathroom... Who knows, the kitchen might actually be a bit warmer by the time I'm done with this little project. But, the whole area needs professional attention. I think both the floor boards and wall board right around where the water heater was will need to be replaced. That will have to wait until we have more money. A dishwasher is seeming like an ever more distant dream...