So, many things have happened these first few weeks (I started writing this post over two weeks ago…life has been crazy). MPLMP has a full time resident, but it’s not me…and I had some visitors come to study the house in the hopes that I might get it on the National Register of Historic Places. During all of this and to continue on until who knows when, work has begun in earnest on making this perfect little money pit, my perfect little money pit.

Kit and I, with much appreciated help from MPLMP’s first resident, Joshua (more on him later), have begun the process of repainting all of the rooms of the house. Many of the rooms either feature near colorless beiges, flaking and peeling paint, or just plain dirty old walls in colors I could do without. The first room we decided to tackle was the medium bedroom.

Seen here right before we started painting.

Although smaller than the master bedroom, this room posed some interesting problems of tight corners between molding and ceilings, and of course the large built-in window seat and bookcases. We removed all hardware and light fixtures, cleaned and sanded all surfaces in preparation (the latter of which made a terrible mess), taped off all edges and then started painting with the ceilings. We decided to match the ceiling and trim to provide a high contrast and balance with the color on the walls. At first the green/blue “Sigh of Relief” color scared me, but everyone else seems to love it, and it’s grown on me.

The final step which is still on-going is painting the trim and doing touch up thanks the surly maiden that is painter’s tape. The built-in bookcases took three coats to start looking decent. Finally we have some color and pure white ceilings, hooray!

We also got the ceiling and walls painted in the smaller bedroom. We wanted to use a lighter color as this room is a bit small and is on the north side of the house. Turns out, the light khaki we chose nearly matches the original paint scheme (restoration by accident). Surprisingly, through some rudimentary paint analysis (see sanding until finding wood/plaster), both rooms since day one used the same color for the trim and walls. I was not willing to concede to this, preferring to turn up the Colonial Revival style flair already present upstairs with painting the trim white.

Was never a big fan of this toothpaste color.

See that light beige over the off-white primer?…the trim and walls were that color, and then they were both that pepto color too.

Here’s the small bedroom before the trim was painted. (Still waiting to do that.) 

Perhaps not surprisingly, we went into this process with a certain level of ignorance and learned many things.

• Always remove tape right after painting (if you don’t the unforgiving tape will rip paint right off the walls or trim).
• You can’t tape, even with the most delicate stuff, on freshly painted walls until at least 24 hours have elapsed, because again it will rip the paint right off the walls.
• When buying paint, the average coverage of 250-400 sqft is a bit generous, assume the lower to middle end of that range (we got dangerously close to running out).
• Everything takes longer then expected when you do it right (this isn’t painting your crappy absentee landlord bedroom from college anymore kids).

Joshua is, as I said, MPLMP’s first full time resident. He is our firm’s summer intern this year, hails from Indiana, and is a fellow preservation nut. He has so far enjoyed his time here, despite the messy work in progress I have him living in. Plus now I don’t have to fret over not being at the house all the time!