Rounding up paint options for Operation Spray Booth

I said last time that I need a good, durable paint for my radiators, and also for a half dozen pieces of furniture, most of which my dad sprayed about 30 years ago.

You can see that although it was a great paint job, it’s ready for a redo. (Also, you’re welcome, Mom, that I took the random Christmas decorations away before taking this photo.) Trouble is, it may be hard to get an equally great job this time around. Environmental regulations mean that good oil based paint, the kind that kills brain cells, destroys the ozone layer, and creates smog, is no longer available. Some reformulated versions are available by the quart at a much higher cost. Or I could buy spray cans. But I don’t like spending extra money for nothing. So let’s look at my other options.

• Rustoleum industrial enamel. This is available by the gallon. It’s oil based, so it’s probably the closest you can get to an old fashioned oil based paint. It also contains rust inhibitors, which would be helpful on the radiators. I could use the same paint on the furniture. I could also use the same paint on the woodwork if I wanted to. The downsides? I’ve read that the more environmentally friendly oils used today yellow faster than the older ones. And this might be the most environmentally unfriendly product I could use overall. And spraying this stuff will mean I’ll have to sleep on a nearby friend’s couch since my house will reek of paint fumes and I’ll probably be in no condition to drive to my parents’ place afterwards. On the other hand, being high as a kite might allow me to go dancing.
• Latex paint. The usual choice for residential painting is easy to get, low odor, relatively good for the environment, and dries fast. This makes it the most convenient option for woodwork, though not necessarily the best. It has latex plant fibers in it, so it isn’t super smooth, and it’s not durable enough for the heat of radiators or to perform properly on furniture. Some people polyurethane over it for furniture projects. Also, cast iron needs to at least be primed with oil or rust spots will bleed through the paint.
• Waterborne alkyds. A few new paints have been developed that use the same alkyd resin that used to be in oil based paint, but with water instead. They’re supposed to be easier to clean up than latex, very low odor, and as hard as traditional oils. Benjamin Moore makes one that’s pure alkyd; some manufacturers make latex/alkyd hybrids. But I’ve read mixed reviews. Ironically, DIY’er blogs say they’re amazing but professional painters say they’re hard to use. They apparently don’t level out quite as smoothly as traditional oil paints, might require more coats, and take several months to cure to full hardness. This last part isn’t a huge deal since I can be delicate with my woodwork and what not. I thought about getting a dog, but may want a few months of no responsibilities anyway.
• Pigmented polyurethane. General finishes makes a water based polyurethane that’s very hard and contains pigments to color it black or white (and the white can be tinted to custom colors). This is low odor and cures extremely hard and smooth. It works beautifully with a sprayer. And although it’s not available in the big boxes, I found a place where I can get it. Sadly, it doesn’t look like it will adhere to cast iron or previously painted wood. But I’m glad I read about it because it might be a good choice for my future kitchen cabinets. We’ll see.
• General Finishes milk paint. I e-mailed for advice about the pigmented poly and they referred me to this. It’s not real milk paint but an acrylic that’s supposed to be very durable. It’s flat but you can coat it with polyurethane (not the poly that’s available pigmented) to make it sturdier and glossier. This is also an extra step, but I could possibly use the same poly on the doors. I’d also still need to use an oil based primer on the radiators. And… it’s a smaller brand and I don’t know that there are equivalents to compare it to.

I just wish I didn’t have to experiment on my own stuff.

Getting ready for prime time

I found out last week that yes, the taping job was officially done, so this weekend both my parents and I were there and cleaned the living daylights out of the place. Wiping down the walls and ceilings, vacuuming the floors multiple times, scraping gunk and spilled compound off of them, and wiping them down with wet rags. And many, many changes of water. A quarter of a bedroom made the dirty water look like chocolate milk. And I got fed up with the cardboard sheets on the floors and took them up. Wahoo! I don’t need them anymore! And my inlaid floors are alive and well underneath!

And remember that lovely maroony purply color that my front bedroom floor is painted? No? Well now you do.

And the back bedroom is looking downright civilized. Mind you, my mom gets cold pretty easily, but 2 of these portable radiators on low (600 watts) make the house comfortable for her. I’m kinda excited for 2-figure heating bills.

So after a day of furious cleaning, my dad and I started to OCD the walls. There were 4 spots the tapers missed that really had to be done. Most of the spots we fixed were imperceptibly tiny and shallow. Two were behind radiators where they’ll never be seen again. Then there were a few gouges over the tub because my box spring was in the way, a couple big spots that they should have gotten, some of the chipped plaster where walls meet exposed brick, and where the railing meets the wall in the upstairs hall. It’s going to take several days of doing small amounts of work to fix all these, but we’re off to a a good start.

The grey spots on that white wall are wet compound my dad put on.

So… my dad bought an electric roller and the plan for this weekend is to prime all of it! The whole house! Then the walls will be strong enough that I won’t risk damaging them by carrying the shop vac through that tiny hallway.

And with primer scheduled, it’s time to think about paint! All of it! So the first thing to think of is practical constraints. I want to spray my radiators… along with a bunch of furniture that belongs my parents and other people I owe favors to. They’re all getting the same paint because there’s no way that I’m going to clean the sprayer to do multiple colors. So if you want anything painted, bring it over. I’ll make it any color you want as long as it’s white.

This also means that I’m committing to the exact same semi-gloss white paint in every room of the house. I’ll make the radiators the trim color. It doesn’t have to be a bright, harsh white, but it has to be white enough to look good with the white tiles on my bathroom floor. The other problem is that I want it to really look good, and unfortunately, the good paints have been banned for decades. So if anyone has experience with the waterborne alkyd paints or the alkyd/latex hybrids, please let me know!

The ceilings will all be the same flat white so that again I can use a power roller. Except the kitchen and bathroom. They need to be scrubbable, and we’ll talk about colors room by room next time. For now, let’s talk about what kind of paint will spray well on my radiators, hold up well on my trim, and comply with environmental laws – I’m not particularly interested in breaking them. And we can talk about exactly what shade of white I want.

Planning the kitchen, Part Infinity

Not quite. I tallied up what’s in the archives and found that this is the 14th post about the kitchen and the 7th that’s more about planning it than building it. I figured that since the IKEA cabinet scare forced the issue this week, I may as well finish the job (of planning it). But first, a before photo. They called this an eat in kitchen in the listing. There was just a fridge, no other work space, on the other side. So there was room for a dinette set if opening the oven door and standing in front of it wasn’t a priority.

And the soon to be after: the base cabinets are going to remain more or less identical to the way they were in that original 3D drawing I made. Except that now the room is just a little bit narrower, so I won’t have the bits of wall on either side of the patio door. Sad, but not devastating.

But the wall cabinets you see up there aren’t accurate at all. I don’t think the chimney hood looks right with cabinets so close to it and my kitchen is too small to sacrifice the upper cabinets. So I decided that I should just put up an unsexy over-the-range microwave. After all, the primary purpose of my kitchen is to give me space and equipment to make food. Secondary to that is space to store things that this food will be cooked, served, and eaten in. And it’s only third, a pretty distant third, that sexiness comes into play.

Also, I have enough height for 48 inches of wall cabinets. I figured that this would mean 18 inch cabinets stacked on top of 30 inch cabinets. But where I have appliances, there’s not enough height to stack them. So in the  end, the stove/fridge wall is going to look like this.

I like the way staked cabinets look, but wasn’t sure about how it would look to have some stacked and some not. But then, having 18 inch tall cabinets stacked over 12 inch cabinets above the fridge and stove would just be dumb.

On the other side of the room, I considered open shelving, but again decided on regular closed cabinets with doors that will hide my chipped, stained, and scratched everyday dishes and the reused plastic food containers I’ll have instead of Tupperware. The width isn’t decided yet. I’m putting up the trim around the window and then I’ll cut the cabinets to whatever custom size looks good around it. Function may win most parts of my kitchen, but woodwork trumps all. And these Craftsman casings (I’m copying the originals) need room to breathe.

So there we have it. I think I want stacked doors rather than running them 4 feet tall. I can wait on that choice, but if I decided now that I want

A kitchen cabinet curve ball

I haven’t talked about how terrifying it is to pick things out in a while. That’s mostly because the last 6 months have been about putting together things that I had already picked out. The kitchen ceiling was one exception. I knew what I wanted, but had to figure out exactly how to put it together. I’m happy with the way it turned out. It was about problem solving. I wanted my cabinets to run as high as possible because my house doesn’t have that much storage space. But going within 2 inches of the beams would leave awkward, narrow gaps between the cabinets and the ceiling. And the ceiling is so crooked that the level cabinets might look weird. The drywall soffits give me a sane, square space to put the cabinets up to. I think they help to bridge the level with the crooked nicely.

A small reveal of my pretty much taped walls!

The tapers appear to be pretty much done! They missed a couple spots that they may have to touch up once more, but overall the work looks really good. Let’s see if my photography can capture the beauty of flat walls. What really impressed me is that where the drywall boards didn’t line up perfectly flat (because the crookedness fights its way through everywhere) they skimmed a foot and a half or more to even things out.

So you can see that the original crookedness is still here, but all smoothed out. And the ceiling should hopefully be sturdy enough not to drop on my head while I’m sleeping now.

The tapers are coming! The tapers are here!

Here they are! I’ve basically handed my house over to them for the week. The house, 10 buckets of joint compound, and 6 rolls of paper tape.

And how did we get here? Another week of little odds and ends. Patching holes in old plaster and defects in new drywall with 20 minute setting compound. Yanking screws and nails that didn’t grab properly and drilling ones that did farther in.

Fully clearing the house means that my grandmother’s red armoire is in the back yard.

Pre-Taping Fever

The fever was rather literal. I had tonsillitis last week. Fine time to get it. The plan was that the Irishman would put up corner bead and Zip bead (where drywall meets exposed beams, exposed brick, etc.) while I put up small patches of drywall in the many spots where little bits were missing. Then this weekend, the crookedness-related gaps around drywall and chunks missing from the old plaster could be filled in with setting compound while other odds and ends of cleanup were finished off.

Instead, the Irishman worked by himself last Saturday. The bead went up, but not much else. He called me while I was cocooned in my (suburban) bed fighting fever chills to tell me there were 4 days’ worth of work left in the house. I flipped out… weakly. Went back to work before I should have, got caught up on things, and my boss didn’t have a problem with me taking a day or two off work if I needed to. I’m lucky with that.

But this weekend, everything came together! The Irishman redid these small drywall squares a half inch higher than I had them, and they look way better. The Zip bead is on with aerosol glue that he said took a few years off his life.

Zip bead around exposed beams

And all the random bits of drywall are up. And the house is (pretty much) cleared out!

Cash for Clutter… and beautiful old plaster!

I just did my Home Depot run. Some of it was stuff I bought shortly after I bought the house… almost 2 years ago. Some of it was stuff I didn’t even recognize… maybe things my plumber left behind. Some of it was visibly dirty, and it must have come from dozens of different receipts. I didn’t even try and just took store credit. And my shame while that poor woman was checking every nut, bolt and washer on the size chart so she could enter the item numbers by hand… and as I watched the line form behind me… let’s just say I wanted to bore a hole in the floor, crawl in it, and die. The only thing to console me was watching the refund amount slowly creep upward. In the end I got $390.48 in store credit. And I got to see this wall again. Until I moved all my doors against it

I have a date! And cleaning to get ready for it.

It’s nothing lame like dinner and a movie.* It’s gonna work like this. At the end of the month, Mario comes in. He’ll have another guy or two with him. I hand him a bank envelope. They’ll be in and out in about 2 hours. Wham. Bam. All the walls in my entire house will be taped and mudded. They come back the next day and do it again. The day after that they sand.

*Note: any time I claim to have no interest in actual dating, I’m probably lying. Probably.

The drywall is essentially complete!

A coworker taught me to use that adverb. It allows me to say something is done, but if it’s not done I’m not wrong. There are a few odd pieces left to finish, but nothing that involves much real work. Nothing in my house is standard though, so here’s a few things that happened that are worth talking about.

The skylight shaft. I wanted to line it with antique V groove paneling like period ones were, but I missed out on the free material because I’m slow. Drywall it is. And hey, this was easier to do.