This Olde House - Touchup work

I suppose this is why people don't do their own renovation work: a constant list of "touchup" work.

After I came home from my adventure in Doe's workshop, I was motivated to check some items off my list. So I spent the next three or six hours working on the dining room.First I had to re-spackle the crown molding. The initial batch had sucked into the nail holes and I wasn't happy with the pre-painted appearance. So I went back over every hole with fresh spackle and a razor blade, to get a thin layer right up against the rest of the un-nailed wood. And a couple of the seams (between two pieces of crown molding) really didn't please me. So I sanded them (again) and applied even more spackle.

While I was waiting for that to dry, I went back over several gaps in the caulking. Seems that the new crown molding is still settling and some of the latex seals had pulled apart. So I went back over those.

By the time I was done with the caulk (my second lap of the ceiling) the spackle had dried. I sanded that down as smoothly as possible and gave the seams some extra love. (Click on the picture above for a zoomed-in image of what I mean. The nailholes were gaping before, but barely visible. And the seam is much smoother. After my third lap of the ceiling, I think a coat of primer and two coats of paint will render everything invisible.

Since I was in the mood, I went ahead and cleaned up the last small items related to the new tile in the dining room. The "threshold" between the tile and the original hardwoods (in the living room) needed to be re-glued. I put a couple of lines of "Liquid Nails" under it and put a chair on top, to hold it down. And since the threshold (the unpainted wooden thing in the picture) wasn't snug against casing (the white wood in the picture) I put a line of wood putty in the small gap, rendering it almost invisible, unless you know what to look for. And there was a really large gap in the tile, next to the casing. You could see down to the foundation. So I brewed up a small batch of grout, and filled the larger gap. After a day or three, it will have dried completely and will match the rest of the grout. Click on the image above to a zoomed-in image.

And finally, I sanded the drywall in the kitchen. Maybe three boards worth. No pictures of that, since it is waaaay boring. And knowing my luck, I'd only manage to get fine white dust in my camera.

Meg was a huuuuge help today. She vacuumed up the dust with my Shopvac and helped dispose of all the stray spackle. Collecting it like pale snow on the floor.

The end result is that the dining room and the kitchen are completely done. They just need to be painted. And Cindy's going to bang that out this weekend....