Labels

How Now, Brown Cow?

Much like knowing when I walked into my house (!!!) that the light was going to be one of the best parts of living there, I knew right away that the dark brown living room wall was going to need to stop being dark brown.

A large, lightly skim-coated wall, looking a lot like a poorly rendered computer grpahic between the occasional trowel lines and the brown paint showing through the white drywall mud.
Already dramatically improved.
Now it's industrial chic instead. Paint will happen, but I'm not going to subject you to a single, mile-long post on a wall. (Instead there will be two posts, because that's how I roll.)

A young white woman removing a nail from a brown wall on tiptoe in a room illuminated by a very bright light too close to the camera. She's wearing a navy hoodie, a long denim skirt, and puffy deep-teal house shoes, and levering a hammer at the edge of her reach.
The sad thing is, I don't think that's even close to the maximum number of shades of blue I've ever worn at once.
Of course, first I had to pull the nails and screws still left in the walls from the prior owners. Don't ask why I'm not standing on the chair. I don't know.

A bad indoors-at-night photo of a wire with large flakes of paint stuck to it, hanging where it was pulled from just above the baseboard against a cream wall, with a hammer and a small metal joint knife on the floor.
I did contemplate whether or not I was risking death by cutting this.
There are also old internet cables stapled and painted to the baseboards and walls all over the place, which look...bad. They're also completely unnecessary now, and no longer connected anyway, so I wriggled a screwdriver under one where it bent up to follow the wall, and pried it free. That was satisfying, although the amount of paint flaking wasn't very.

Also please not the double stacked quarter round against the existing baseboard. That's a heck of a lot of baseboarding, and it means I'm going to need to do some inventive things to hide the flooring gap when I replace it.

A close-up of the bottom corner of a dark brown wall with two layers of white trim, one clearly part of the wall and one a piece of quarter-round tacked on later. The right-side quarter round has been popped free of the wall, showing the slight gap where the flooring approaches it.
You lie.
Yes, of course I pulled the baseboards. Why make a project simple when you could add labor and expense?
 
I should have known when the quarter round popped off easily that getting the other baseboard off was going to entail some really significant work.

A photo down the length of a dark brown wall, with a very bright light coming in from right, and a piece of trim partially removed at the base of the wall. A single row of floorboards has been lifted and stands on edge, casting a deep shadow over the subfloor. Small piles of broken wood bits are scattered across the floor.
Confused yet?
That's the first row of floorboards pulled up—as I thought, they're snap-together laminate, which makes getting them out of the way of recalcitrant baseboards that need to be wrenched from place with a crowbar easier than it might have been otherwise.

A rather large spider in a corner where one piece of trim has been removed and one is partially pried from the wall, surrounded by flakes of paint and wood chips.
AUGH
I won, though not without a moment of great excitement when not just one, but two Spiderum mysteriosum showed up. Behind the baseboard. Which I was levering away from the wall with my bare hands. I did not shriek, but retribution was swift and English.

The base of a narrow, deep brown wall with the trim removed, showing a nail from adjoining trim that missed the wall entirely, lots of pieces of wood that don't seem to meet the subfloor, and quite a mat of short dog fur and fuzzy carpet shreds.
I spy...a lot of dog fur, actually.
I'm not entirely convinced any of that wall's internal bits actually contact the floor...anywhere. Obviously the hallway trim isn't attached to the wall at the corner, either. That's nice to know for future me, whenever I get around to changing out the carpet back there.

A worn and paint-daubed screwdriver levered under a piece of vertical trim in a corner of deep brown wall, with a hammer being swung to drive the screwdriver upward and wrench the remaining trim free.
Not an approved use of your screwdrivers.
I'm not a fan of the trim packed into the corners to seal the gaps between the plywood closet and the drywall, so I removed it. Now, of course, I need to seal or hide the gaps with something else, but I have some clever ideas for that.

A very bad indoors-at-night shot with a too-bright lamp sitting on the floor, of a deep brown wall with a small bump out, with most of the trim removed from the base and corners, and from the ceiling around the bump out. A small stepladder sits over a pile of broken trim bits in the corner.
Ready for an haute couture shoot.
Most of the trim came off in little fragments, between the nails holding it down and being firmly glued in with silicon and thick layers of paint.

A deep brown wall with plywood showing around the edges where trim was removed, with patchy white speckles on the upper half.
This is a daytime photo. It's really that color.
Sanding! Sanding is pretty boring. You can make it less boring if you don't wear safety glasses while you're working above your head, because then the weird rolled up bits of super-thick paint the sandpaper is scritching off will fall into your eyes, and you will spend the rest of the evening wondering if acrylic wall paint is sharp enough to scratch corneas.

Not that I would know.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment