Just More Home Updates.

In a post I wrote last night that somehow showed up under March 1st, I mentioned I was still in the process of refinishing our baseboards. This project has been long delayed for 3 reasons:

1. We want to seal where the wall meets the foundation to keep little creepy crawlers out of the house, and that means getting my husband committed to spending a few hours getting it done while also getting the kids out of the house so they don't end up sealed to the floor as well.

2. We originally talked about painting the kitchen cabinets white, but that would mean repainting all the doors and doorframes and baseboards white as well, since the kitchen is teeny and an off-white door next to white-white cabinets would look really horribly bad.

3. It's a lot of work.

An embarrassingly long time ago, I took the kids on a walk to Home Depot, and brought home a gallon of paint to be used for the baseboards and eventually for the doors and all the other walls we're keeping this color (such as the stairway and one wall in the great room). It wasn't as easy as just picking up a paint can, though. I brought a small, clean piece of baseboard with us in hopes of finding a color match, but the machine couldn't read the board so it kept giving me gray or chocolate milk colors which were clearly not correct. Luckily, the Home Depot dude took pity and promised to make me a match, so I walked out with a custom color made to blend with the old paint, and therefore with the doors and doorframes.

And....that paint can sat around for so long, waiting to be used, that I actually forgot where we'd stored it when I got the painting bug a few days ago. But before we could paint, we had to clean and sand the baseboards, which I did board by board whenever I had some spare time to dedicate while the kids napped or played outside. I planned to use a small electric sander, but soon realized that steel wool and an Xacto knife did the trick much more effectively.

It was about as fun as it sounds. For a point of reference, most of the baseboards were coated with silicone caulking, a few too many old layers of paint, and lord knows what else. In a word: gross.

I mean, ew.

Anyhow, post-sanding, they looked like this, which is MUCH better:

And after a coat of paint, they are looking all sparkly and fresh and new. Mostly. I mean, they aren't ever going to look perfect, but they sure look better now than they did a few months back.

Since there were a lot of pieces, we needed a way to keep them straight, so I took a Sharpie to the backs and wrote their room positions:

My hope is that I'll finish all the painting this weekend so we can seal and re-install next weekend. Man it will be NICE to have this done!

------------------------------------------------------------------

On another note, back when I was pregnant with Rohan, I started saving fortunes from our fortune cookies, especially if I thought they were especially poignant at the time.

I've been saving fortunes ever since, and while I have a more permanent solution in mind, they are temporarily taped to the vent above our stove. I see them everyday, and I like it.