Sunday, January 21, 2007

Hallway Painted



The walls are Soft Chincillla, and the ceiling is silver metallic (They're both Benjamin Moore colours). It's called metallic, but it's really just a grey. I'm not 100% happy with the repairs I did on the walls. I don't want to make them too perfect, I still like the plaster wavy, you can tell that some of it was from when the previous owner demoed the bedroom, and wrecked the hallway plaster in the process. The ceiling needs more work too, we're going to wait, and live with it for now, since we'd never get anything finished, if we were that anal about everything.












I put the light back up in the foyer as well, we haven't decided on a light for there yet. This is the light that was there when we moved in. I don't know how old this light is, it's at least from the 50's we think. The wiring looks at least that old.
















Now to get all the wood work stripped and refinished. The woodwork was always painted, so it's difficult to strip, it has this weird thick shellac primer as the first coat. The only room that had shellacked trim as far as we know, was the kitchen. Seems kind of backwards. I have the door for the upstairs stairwell stripped, and we put the first coat of waterlox on it. I'm going to take the linen closet door off next. It's mostly stripped on the front, just have to do the inside. I need to take it off, to get all the gunk off the hinges. They're brass butterfly hinges. We want to strip and refinish most of the trim in place. Just to avoid splitting it, and the joints are nice and tight now, don't know if I'd get it back on so nicely. It'll be 3 years this week, that we moved in to the house. It's almost 3 years since we started the hallway project (we've done a lot in the interrim), and I'd like to finish the project before 3 years is up. So I have a busy few weeks coming up. I'm not going to include finishing the floor in that, since it might be best to do most of the floor at the same time.

2 comments:

Erie's Argonaut said...

The colors you chose look nice. I have found that if there is shellac down as the base coat, paint will strip off very easily with a heat gun. Then just use denatured alcohol and stripping grade steel wool to remove the remaining shellac. I bought some Waterlox but haven't used it yet. How did you like working with it?

Derek said...

Unfortunately it isn't shellac underneath, I have a couple of salvage doors like that, and they are much easier. The waterlox is great, easy to work with, I just apply 3 or 4 coats with a rag. I hear it's easy to repair, unlike poly, haven't had to repair any yet though. We're planning to use it on the floor eventually too.