Museum • The House • Dining Room
This is the general look of the Dining Room before. The walls are the same off off-white as the rest of the house, one window has a typical dingy set of mini-blinds, and both windows have dull valences, and no curtains.
This is a spot typical of the cracked paint that prompted me to fix the wall treatment in the first place. When I bought the house it looked like the whole place had recently been painted. After a year or so, on a particularly humid day, I noticed some of the paint was cracked and peeling away from the wall -- a sure sign of inadequate surface treatment prior to the last paint job.
This is the first time I peeled away a sheet of the cracked paint. I had originally assumed that the problem was a lack of cleaning, sanding, deglossing, etc before painting. After peeling away the paint film I ran my fingers along the exposed area and came away with a film of white dust. Looks like the last painters sanded the wall, but didn't bother to wash away the sanding dust, and it's the dust that caused the lift-off patches.
The part at the upper left that looks kind of like Africa is the original area I was working on. Once I started scraping the wall I kept finding new places where the paint had bubbled away, even if it wasn't cracked yet. The light grey patches are some annoying kind of filler that never hardened - I can scratch it with my fingernail. It all has to come off before priming.
Somebody please explain to me one more time why this is so difficult. I've seen something in apartments, and also in older homes too many times to count. People get a long-nap roller, and slop paint over everything in sight, including hinges, doorknobs, wallplates, switches, and receptacles. I've seen wallplates and receptacles with so many layers of paint over them it looks like the snout of a pig trying to push its way through the wall. All it takes to do the job correctly is to remove two screws and pull off the plate, and stick on a couple little scraps of wide masking tape. This is one of very few switches in the house worth saving, the receptacles and most of the other switches are going to be replaced.
Like most of the old registers and returns in the house, this was painted black. The problem I have with this register, and any others of its vintage, is that it's basically a flap behind the grille. There is no ability to regulate air flow - the flap is either open or closed. Further, the way the flap is hung it tends to just fall closed. I'm not sure what was originally intended to hold it open, but at present there is a little bit of black string tied around the handle to keep it open. There is also a little bit of filter cloth stuck to the inside of the grille with double-stick tape. My idea of proper air control is a little different than that.
Nothing fancy here, just a modern louver/damper in plain white.
This air return is typical of two, one in the Dining Room, and the other in the Living Room. Both have been painted black, as were the registers.
I just painted the inside of the air return opening black, so if you can see through the grille it's basically just a dark cavern rather than the dirty white it was before.
New air-return grille. Again, nothing fancy, however the louvers make that black painting superfluous since now you can't see directly into the opening. You can also see the "antique bronze" style wallplates I used for the receptacles and the lightswitch. Since this picture was taken I realized that the bronze was completely out of place and replaced them with plain white. The floor is a bad news/good news joke -- a lot of paint found its way past the masking tape and paper, the good news is I was always planning to do something about the floors.
A similar view to "Basic Before", with the new colors. All that's left is window treatments, floor, and better furniture.
One Standard Curtain Rod - $3.00 One Pair Pinch-Pleated Sheers - $34.00 One Decorative Curtain Rod - $50.00 One Pair Matching Holdbacks - $35.00 One Pair Burgundy Drapes - $30.00 One Scarf Top Treatment - $7.00 Finally being able to walk around the house naked - Priceless.