painting and closets

Yesterday was a big painting day. I was able to finish up painting the kitchen (except for a little in the water heater area) and ended up doing the edging myself after we came home from dinner last night.

In addition to painting the kitchen, I decided that I really needed to finish up a few other painting projects. I had a few touch-ups to do on the brown paint, one area I had totally forgotten to paint down by the carpet and another touch-up where they gouged the woodwork getting our couch in the door. I also wanted to paint the entire woodwork surrounding the dining room closet door and also paint the back side of the door. This was my dark brown paint going over white, so I put on the first coat yesterday and touched it up with pretty much a second coat this morning.

I have been planning to put in a second clothing rod in my main closet since we moved in. I finally asked where the rods were at Home Depot and found what I wanted and as I had gotten up early today, I had enough time to add the 2nd rod (though it was not easy to do) and get my closet more organized.

Then I decided to tackle my second closet that is also the attic entrance. During the home inspection, I am SURE the home inspector moved aside some sort of pop-up to get into the attic. I had thought that the entrance to the attic was open, so I took everything out of the closet and removed the shelf to see for myself. Sure enough the entrance to the attic was wide open. I had some trouble getting my ladder into the closet and finally had to settle for sort of wedging it in and going up the ladder sideways while it was still folded up. This did allow me to get all the way up to the attic and low and behold... there was no pop-up, nothing to close the attic off with at all. I finally managed to get a piece of foamular up there, but it does not really fit in the hole properly so the attic is definitely not closed off, but I'm hoping sort of closed off is better than not closed off at all.

Back in the kitchen, I had a small hole in the wall back where the water heater used to be and also a much larger hole than their needed to be around one of the pipes left over from the water heater. I ended up filling these holes with expandable foam, which worked pretty well, though I did kind of smooth it around with a paper towel to get it to fill in the hole in the wall. I'm sure when I actually have someone really fix that area (add flooring and wainscotting to the wall) the foam might be a touch of a pain, but at least for right now I have plugged up a major source of cold air into my kitchen.

The next few days I probably won't have time to do much, but I am hoping to maybe get the lower part of the water heater area painted white. Then I will be able to move the toaster oven cart back into place and the kitchen will essentially be done for the time being. We shall see...