The painters are here for at least the next two days.
In addition to painting everything in the addition, they’ll also be painting:
- Quilt Studio
- Family Room
- Guest Bathroom
In the quilt studio, some of the furnishings were moved into the garage, with everything else piled in the center of the room. Those knotty pine walls will soon be white (or more accurately, “Snowbound,” one of dozens of shades of “white” paint).
Preparing for paint in the Quilt Studio.
In the family room, the painters removed a few items, but mainly they pushed everything away from the walls and covered it all with plastic.
Painting is under way in the family room.
Both rooms get all new paint — walls, ceiling, and trim.
A problem cropped up in the family room. When the painters removed the window locks and other hardware prior to painting, some of the window trim fell off! It was held on only by the hardware. Apparently, whoever installed the windows many years ago took a few shortcuts. Wesson will send a carpenter to fix this.
Trim around the family room windows was never fastened down.
Painting has started in the quilt studio.
Painting the quilt studio.
The painting crew is also responsible for caulking around the new door frames and for spackling the nail holes in the frames. The spackle starts out pink and turns white as it cures.
Caulking the door frames.
The pink spots on the left-hand door frame are spackle.
Out in the addition, the only remaining evidence of our old bedroom are the brown closet doors. It won’t be long until they are replaced with white doors to match the rest of the house. The whole addition has been primed and is ready for the finish coat of paint.
Those brown closet doors are all that’s left of the old bedroom.
Back on May 13 — the first day of framing — the back wall of the bedroom was demoed, and we found a nasty surprise. The southwest corner of the old foundation was about ¾-inch higher than the foundation anywhere else in the house. It might have been poured that way, or 58 years of freezing and thawing might have caused it to move. It looked like this:
Foundation problem. Click image for closeup.
When the new slab was poured for the addition, it was made level with the other end of the bedroom. It wasn’t until the wall came down that we discovered that one corner of the bedroom floor was higher than the rest of the bedroom.
Now, with the bedroom expanded, this difference in floor height is no longer hidden in the corner but is right in the main part of the bedroom.
The difference in floor level is about 3/4-inch at the wall.
Left: Floor of addition. Right: floor of old house.
The difference in height between the old and new foundations decreases as you move away from the wall toward the camera in the photo above. Where I was standing to make the photo above, there is virtually no difference in floor height from left to right.
The solution is going to involved pouring concrete on the low area and introducing a gradual slope so that that difference in height will be spread across several feet and, hopefully, be difficult to notice when the room is finished and carpeted. The concrete contractor was here today to assess the situation and formulate a plan.
The same operation will address smaller differences in floor height between other parts of the addition and the old parts of the house. Little did we know when we started this project that our bathroom, bedroom, and family room all had different floor heights.