My Saturday

Saturday before I got to quilt I had to help hubs with the molding. This is a never ending process lately. We have to wait days between staining to get the boards to the point where the stain cures enough. The heat and the rain has been doing a number on our process. Irony there is that you can stain when its too cold so we had to wait for it to be hot... now the heat is keeping it sticky and humid! You can never win in home renovation!

Here is a picture of the wainscoting and some of the molding. The paneling is on the part of the drop down ceiling in the middle of the room. You can see the old color of the paneling, the new color of the paneling and how the molding actually took the stain even darker. You can also see the paint color even though its not light or pink like the picture shows!

Closer picture of the molding and the "old color" stain. the over all effect of the room isn't much different, but when you look at the new vs old you can see how darker and clean looking it seems.

This is the mantel and a piece of wood that we continue to forget to take down. Its not an important piece so it keeps getting over looked. But it is an example of stained vs untouched. It also shows the black stone cap that goes around the room. We are attempting to replaces this with a tiled shelf. It needs something to cap off the cinder blocks under it, but the black is just depressing. There is also no black in the room really and with all the dark wood it is too much. Before we stained and painted all the molding had to come down. When it was removed you could see seems that shouldn't have been there. My biggest shock was the fire place that was any where from 1/4 from the wall to 3 or so inches! This was a little drafty and was allowing for major bugs. You could tell by the number of dead bugs behind the molding and cob webs that were present.

To fix this problem we used expanding foam. If you have never used this is product it is both amazing and annoying. You fill the space 50% of the way and then over the next 24 hours or so it expands another 50% hopefully filling the gap. I had to go back through and fill a few spaces that just didn't get expanded to, but other then that the product will do its job. It is also a big mess. I had it on my hands for about 48 hours and just couldn't get it off. Still have spots that have worn off. At the end of Saturday's project we had 90% of the boards stained and up on the top half of the living room. The bottom half and baseboards are yet to be stained due to heat, moisture, and pure lack of space to do so much in the garage. What is up... well it looks amazing! Between the new wall color and the darker stain... its very nice! there will be picture to come... but for now... this is it!