Painting the Inside of the House

 After getting the bathrooms remodeled, we wanted to go ahead and get the rest of the inside of the house finished.  That means making sure that all the rooms have been painted.  We painted the computer room when we had the ceiling removed and the loft created in 2002. The Guest Bedroom next to it was painted when Dorothy moved in in 2012, and for some reason, I did the Dining Room too.  The Back Bedroom and Bathroom were painted in 2019 when the bathroom was remodeled.  And of course the Master Bath and Center Bath have just been redone this year.

So that leaves the Kitchen, the Living Room, the Library, the Master Bedroom and the Pass-thru as major rooms.  Plus, the Utility Room, Pantry, Entryway, Coat Closet, Master Closet, Hallway, and the Closets for the Back Bedroom and the Guest Bedroom. Five major rooms, plus five closets/pantry, and the 3 small rooms: utility, entry, and hallway.

In addition, the two closets, for the Back Bedroom and Guest Bedroom, and the Pantry still had popcorn ceilings, so we asked for those to be redone to match the walls, and then painted at the same time.

We used Angie's List (now called just Angi) to generate a list of highly rated painters. And then selected four from that list. Plus we added the one that had painted our daughter's condo recently.  One of those did not respond, so we got 4 estimates.  One came out suspiciously low, one too high and two others were effectively the same in the middle, and one of those two was Fresh Coat Painting, who had painted my daughter's condo.  So we went with them, with an estimate of $4843.94.  This was all in the middle of June.

Erick at Fresh Coat called a week or so later and said they could start on Monday, 1 July, giving us a week or so to prepare.

Linda had picked out the colors -- Hemp for the walls and Heavy Cream for the ceilings (for the 2 closets and pantry that were having the popcorn removed).  These are both Martha Stewart colors that we use elsewhere in the house.  The ceilings are almost all Heavy Cream, and we already have Hemp in the Dining Room and the Guest Bedroom.

The main thing we had to do for the painters was to move all the furniture away from the walls, so they could be painted.  We used the rooms that were not being painted as storage for the stuff that had to be moved out of the other rooms.  Plus all the hanging clothes had to be taken out of the closets, and all the pictures, hat racks,   and such removed from the walls.  The result was large piles of stuff in the center of the rooms and on the beds.

But it also meant that some shelves were bare for the first time in a long time.

It took two days for them to paint.  I think it was 4 to 6 people. After the ceilings had the popcorn removed, they were textured and then a sealer applied.  All the walls and ceilings got two coats of the new paint.

Since the Master Bedroom was being painted, we moved to the Back Bedroom to keep out of the way.

While I had the opportunity, I sanded the closet rods and applied a coat of polyurethane. I did the same to the pantry shelves and the surface of the built-in desk in the kitchen.  

Then while that dried, I went about re-installing all the stuff I had removed to allow them to paint -- shelf supports, curtain rod holders in the library, the light fixtures in the rooms which had the ceiling redone, the gas dryer, the wire shelves in the utility room and the closets, and so on.  Then we started to put things back and move the furniture back in place. which took another week.  We still have some of that to do.