Home Office... Covering Up The Ugly Bits

The home office is coming along, but we're in that annoying stage that involves a lot of small time-consuming tasks that don't look particularly pretty until we get to the next stage (i.e. paint). But if we don't do them properly the paint won't look any good. We've learned that the hard way, but it doesn't make me any less impatient to get this part over!!!

So let me just wizz through it and we can pretend it happened like magic, not over the course of many painful weekends.

Here's where we left off after getting through the messy first few stages (see here)...

The most obvious ugly bits are all the gaps between the ceiling boards. So I pulled out a picture of the original ceiling and attempted to lie out the timber battens we had pulled off the original ceiling. It's surprisingly difficult! Don't judge me.

But we got there eventually.

We paint scraped all of the boards, and then laid them out...

Ready for an undercoat.

 
Meanwhile, onto another ugly bit! The window frame!

We didn't bother salvaging the extremely boring architrave that we'd pulled off the window originally, so bought some new stuff, cut it to size, and voila, the window instantly looks more finished.

Next, cornices. This is where having an angled ceiling adds a serious layer of complexity. Most pre-made cornices are designed for ceilings that are at right-angles to the walls. I'm sure the pros have a much more sophisticated (and simple) way of dealing with this problem, but we had to wing it. So we started by tracing the top and bottom of where our cornice needed to sit on both walls and ceilings, which gave us the point at which they needed to intersect.

We cut off two little pieces of timber cornice to experiment with, and trialed-and-errored it until they fit together nicely in the corner. We could then use them as our templates for the real pieces.

Magic! Cornice and architrave over the doorway installed, puttied and no-more-gaps-ed!

Window architrave puttied and no-more-gaps-ed...

Skirting boards installed...

All of the putty etc sanded...

The VJ wall opposite the door corniced, puttied and sanded...

The window frame painted (I know, I cheated and skipped to the painting stage a little bit). What a difference paint makes...
 

And continuing with the cheating (I know, the earmark of a super exciting life is that painting before installing ceiling battens constitutes cheating), we undercoated the ceiling...

Before finally installing the undercoated timber battens! Again, as if I just clicked my fingers and they appeared!

Next stage... can you guess what it is?

Painting!!! Am I the only one DYING to see it painted?

Home Office... Begin!

I know it doesn't sound like the room that's likely to be the first priority in most renovations, but the home office was definitely mine! As someone who works from home all day every day, I need somewhere to do it, and unfortunately I'm a bit too set in my ways to enjoy being parked in a corner of the dining room with the printer in another room six metres away and everything else in boxes.

It also didn't hurt that the room we had earmarked to be my office happened to be one of the smallest rooms in the house (that wasn't a bathroom) that didn't require major structural work. Made it seem so much more achievable to begin with the prospect of actually finishing it within our grasp!

So here is what we were starting with.

The ceiling had certainly seen better days, so it was going to need some serious work.

And the view from the verandah was no more inviting.

So where to start...

The peeling paint, the stained carpet... eugh!

We decided to leave the carpet where it was for the moment to protect the floorboards, and I started to scrape the paint off the window frame.

I even had a go at the wall to the right of the window with the scraper as well, as you can see from the blue-green patch on the top right of the above photo. It didn't take me long to learn that that was more pain than it was worth!

Tom got to scrape the VJ wall to the right of the windows...

And I attempted to keep the paint dust at bay with intermittent vacuuming...

And then attacked the windows themselves. They were NOT in good condition (more on them later).

Meanwhile, Tom plied me with cheese and biscuits through the gaping holes in the wall that removing the paint-peel-ey lattice left behind. You can see from the little bluey-green patches in this photo as well that I attempted some paint scraping on the VJ areas beneath the lattice gaps and on the back of the door. With varying degrees of success.

And then there was the ceiling.

It didn't take us long to decide that it wasn't the place for our little paint scrapers. You can't really see it in the photos, but practically the entire thing was peeling. Little teeny tiny bubbles of peeling paint. So either we had to scrape the lot or...

We had to get rid of it!

So we went with option 2.

And we decided to do the same with the wall that the window sits in as well.

 
So now with the room back to its skeleton, we had a fresh start. We bought some big sheets of fibro from the hardware store (and a fibro sheet cutter because we seemed to have lost ours in the house move), and started the slow process of cutting them down to size.

Now here's something. The process of putting up ceiling boards is SO much easier than it looks! I know from experience that this is probably true for almost every renovating task under the sun, but each and every board we put up shocked me. They're heavy, and holding them up in the right place while the other person nails them in is HARD!

Nevertheless, piece by piece, up they went. And we realised just in time that we should jam some insulation in there too.

It turned into quite the jigsaw puzzle, since we didn't want to have to install more timber trim pieces to cover the seams between the ceiling boards than absolutely necessary.

Piece by piece by piece. Amazing how big a ceiling can feel in such a small room!

With the ceiling sheeted, we moved on to the walls. We decided to be super careful and glue both the wall...

And the fibro sheet...

 

Before then nailing them in. And it's clear that we tackled a lot of this after sunset. The poor neighbours.

As you can see, we removed the carpet when we finished paint scraping, leaving us with the lovely original floorboards. Not polished yet, but a million times better than the old dusty stained carpet!

With the exposed weatherboards on the wall around the door covered up with fibro, we moved our attention to the opposite wall, beneath the VJs that Tom had scraped earlier. The existing wall sheet beneath the VJs was considerably further recessed than the rest of the wall, so we decided to add some cheap bargain-bin lengths of pine to bump it out a bit...

And then glued and nailed a sheet of fibro over the top.

Finally we moved on to the window wall and repeated the process there. We were running out of sheets by that stage, so it required a bit of clever jigsaw puzzling.

And there it was! A freshly sheeted room! I can't even begin to describe how much cleaner it felt! Even with the coating of dust on the floor.

So how about a before and after? Even if the 'after' is really a 'during' since we're not even remotely finished yet. At least we've moved past the yellow though, right? Give us a bit more time to throw some trim and paint at it and we'll blow your socks off! Hopefully.

Windows of Hell

So the windows... OMG the windows!

This is a LONG post (43 photos!). But surely you'd prefer to just get ALL of the upstairs windows done in one giant post than have me talk about windows non-stop for the next two weeks, right?

So shall I list all of the windows that need painting for you? Let's work our way around the house in a clockwise direction! Doesn't that sound like fun?

The office windows (just undercoated so far)...

And the new section of wall beneath them that has been cleverly hidden by my printer cabinet...

So I painted them (two coats of gloss).

And the wall beneath. Can you spot me in this mess?

So then the office looked like this. Yay!

But no time for rejoicing. Get back to painting!

So then there's the bathroom window. Like the office windows it's brand new. Unlike the office windows, I haven't even undercoated it yet.

And the frame around it is definitely not brand new, so it isn't in the best condition.

So I gave it a bit of a paint-scrape...

And a sand...

And then I painted the window and its frame. Three times.

And forgot to take a proper picture of it fully painted. So you'll just have to live with this fancy shot that clearly shows that the window is no longer natural-timber-coloured.

Office down. Bathroom down. Now the laundry!

Unlike all of the other windows in the house, it's a little single-hung window. And it is NOT in good condition.

This is where I had to start a bit of a fight with myself. I'm a perfectionist. I hate looking at something and knowing that I've taken shortcuts and I could have done it better. The problem with the windows on this house is that really, to do them properly, I would need to completely strip back all of the paint and start painting them again from scratch. That's a LOT of work. And we've got a deadline! Ain't nobody got time for that! So I have to compromise. And I hate it. Because attempting to partially scrape these windows is like pulling a loose thread on a woolly jumper. The whole thing starts unravelling. And getting that delicate balance of just-enough-but-not-too-much-and-as-fast-as-possible is HARD!!!

Particularly with an old blunt paint scraper.

And I have no idea what happened to our safety gear. I improvised with a tea towel and sunglasses. Good look, huh? Particularly with the fuzzy all-over-the-place-and-I-couldn't-care-less hair!

Oh, and the tea towel was held on with a bulldog clip. Am I resourceful or what?

Okay, office supplies aside, I got the window mostly scraped.

And then I painted it. Three times. Whew! Laundry down.

Next up, the dining room windows! I've had those breezy IKEA curtains hanging in front of the dining room windows for months now to partially obscure those panes of yellow glass that I'm not a huge fan of. First things first, they had to come down.

Then, before painting, we wanted to deal with this rusty, messy old window hardware.

So we replaced it all with fresh new stuff.

And then came the painting.

In fact before painting, it was paint scraping.

And this is finally where we got smart. Instead of attempting to tackle it with the ridiculous old blunt scraper that made me want to curl up in a ball and cry while nursing my bleeding fingers, we actually took ourselves off to Bunnings to see what smart people who want to scrape paint do. And amazingly, they don't do what we'd been doing! So we came home with a heat gun and this beauty.

Source

It's got some kind of fancy diamond blade, and I am completely in love. It snarls its way through paint like it's butter. There's still some elbow grease involved if you want to go all the way back to bare timber, but particularly when I hit an area with the heat gun first, it's amazing.

So here I am, paint scraping by the light of the moon.

So with the dining room windows and their frame at that it's-good-enough level of paint scraped-ness, I followed with puttying any not-so-pretty bits (like where the old window hardware attached)...

And then painted. And painted. And painted.

Are you sensing something of a pattern here? Well we're still not done yet! Stay with me here! And just imagine how claw-like my hands were getting painting each of those little timber strips on each window!

So now for the kitchen!

Those windows that we put above the kitchen sink weren't original to the house. We bought them at a demolition yard, and the paint, particularly on the left window, was really badly cracked. I scraped off the area in this shot with just a screwdriver.

But first things first, since this window has a tendency to flap open and then bang closed if it's not secured, new hardware!

But rather than going through the gory details (marking, pre-drilling, screwing, it's not rocket science), let's cut to the lovely hardware-installed after shot! Hurrah!

And then the painting. Sigh. But first the paint scraping! I ended up taking back that left window to bare timber, mostly. The right window wasn't doing so badly.

And THEN the painting. This window involved the most uncomfortable painting positions I have encountered to date. Try perching over a sink and trying not to put too much of your weight on the thin sections of benchtop on the front and back of it!

Hooray! Finally painted!

The other two windows either side of the stove and rangehood got the same treatment.

Aaaand moving on.

Bedroom two. One little window pair. They don't look too bad from afar.

But up close, particularly the window sill, that ain't pretty. Some idiot painted right over some partially peeled paint, so there's nothing for it but to strip it back if I want a nice smooth finish.

So strip it back I did.

Sanding, undercoating, painting painting....  and done! Man I wish it really happened that fast!

Okay! So the final room on our clockwise tour of the house is the master bedroom! With SIX lovely windows to deal with! So we shuffled the mattress out of the room, draped up the curtains out of the way...

And I got my scrape on again.

And Tom actually removed those front windows so I could get better access to them for some scraping action (and so he could cut off some extra length that was stopping them from closing perfectly). Allie was happy that the action was finally down at her level so that she could supervise my technique properly.

So without any windows on the front of the house, we decided to set up our mattress in the dining room. It was fun! Like camping, but with all the creature comforts!

And I kept painting. And painting. And painting.

When I had FINALLY finished painting, Tom re-installed the windows again, and we put up some security bars for a bit of added security. It's a two-storey window so there's not a high likelihood that someone would manage to climb in, but particularly with the bed in that spot, it wouldn't be too hard for someone to fall out of that window! So we nabbed ourselves some second-hand bars from a demolition yard, sprayed any less-than-perfect bits white, and now no-one will take a quicker-than-desired trip down to the front yard.

So that's it! At LONG last, we can call these windows DONE!

Who else is relieved?