Lots of Bad Joke Potential

This morning Noel finished up the last bits of sanding of the epoxy wood repair stuff, so it was time to start caulking around the cracks. But first! Let's look at how the room looked when Noel finished the sanding. You can't see much of his work, because the wide shots are terrible for capturing that, but look at how nice the wood looks.

Where you see white patches that is the epoxy. It sands very nicely, and with any luck it won't be totally ugly obvious when we finish painting.

We got this stuff, with a bunch of other kits for wood repair, from West Marine, which is a boating supply shop near here. Apparently people who own wood boats spend a lot of time repairing them.

When Noel cleared out, I moved in with the caulk gun. For some reason, I have gotten really good at caulking, even though I've done a minimal amount of it (a couple of tubs and then whatever I've done here). Anyway, let me show you how caulk can clean up a room ready to be painted.

Here we have one of the corners of the room before caulking. See that prominent crack along the woodwork? You just can't get plaster or drywall mud to fill that nicely. And trying to let the paint cover that is crazy.

The same corner, after caulking. Instead of a large crack there's a nice smooth caulked surface, tooled with my finger so it's not machine-perfect, but it will look good painted.

I learned about the importance of caulking from a book about professional paint jobs. In hindsight, it's an incredibly easy way to make a room a lot more paintable.

Today I got about halfway done, though there are some larger gaps I need to go back to. Technically, I could go back and caulk more two hours after the first pass, but I've had a busy weekend. Tomorrow, the ceiling and a second pass.

Technorati Tags: paint removal, painting, caulk, sanding

posted by ayse on 03/09/08