Our house is getting a much needed fresh coat of paint on its interior. It’s about 20 years old and most of the paint was original so it was time. A few days ago I posted about what I did ‘before the painters’; today I’ll follow up to report what actually happened during the painting. This is part II of our painting saga!
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After several weeks of prep work, the big day came. There would be 4-5 people painting for 4 days and then 2 people the last day to finish up painting the entire interior of the house.
On the first day everything I could do had been done for the master bedroom/bath/closets and the upstairs rooms. Curtains were down, furniture was in the center of the room, the walls were empty, and everything electric was unplugged and moved to the center or elsewhere. I used our loft area for lamps and overflow furniture from the other rooms; it would be painted on a later day (day 4). That strategy allowed me to minimize the rearranging required between rooms as the painters worked. I merely moved lamps and furniture back where they belonged after those rooms were painted.
On day 2 the upstairs was finished except for the hall and the loft. In addition the living room and dining room was completed. That was the one day five people worked. The surprise for me was how hard custom drapes can be to take down (and get hung again) in the living room and dining room. I had made an attempt to take them down but ended up having the painters do it with their ladders on day 2 before those areas were painted and they went back up on day 5. We ended up vacuuming them. If I had planned ahead, I might have been able to rush them to the dry cleaners.
Day 3 was when the most substantial surprise occurred. There was some water damage in an upstairs ceiling from a roof problem. The initial plan was to replace the drywall in that area - about a 2x2’ area. When they started doing the repair they realized it was a bigger area and insulation began falling out of the ceiling as they made the hole large enough to repair the damage. Insulation had to be replaced. They worked some extra hours to get the repair made so they could get the first coat of paint on it during day 4.
Day 3 was also the day the kitchen was painted. I had not been able to get the curtains over the sink down and the painters couldn’t either - so they wrapped plastic around them and painted with the curtains in place!
Day 4 was a huge catch up day. The larger repair of drywall was sanded and painted. The upstairs hall, foyer, and loft were painted. That left some baseboards, window frames, doors and the laundry room for day 5. The rehanging of the custom curtains took a significant amount of time.
Now that the job is complete - I’m very grateful that the painting crew I hired was committed to cleaning up each and every day and vacuuming while they worked if dust was being created. When the insulation started falling out of the ceiling I had visions of the mess extending far beyond the actual work area and that I would be working on the clean up after they left for the evening. It was a pleasant surprise to find everything cleaned up and in a large plastic trash bag. They made a pile of their materials each day in an out-of-the-way place - usually in the room/rooms they would be working on the next day.
When they left the last day everything was cleaned up - all the outlet and switch plates were back in place - and most of the tape was off the door knobs (they missed three door knobs…but that was easy for me to do myself).
The house seems very clean…like new. There are some walls that look better than they looked when we moved into the house when it was as few years old. This fresh coat of paint is my extreme form of ‘spring cleaning’ for 2012.
but these catalpa trees at Longwood did not seem have a strong smell. Maybe different types of catalpa have more smell that these did.
