Here is the living room as it looked this morning…I know I have kept you waiting long enough!

(My apologies for the pathetically styled table…I need to work on that!)

Clearly we still have a long way to go….such as:

Dining room chairs for the chair-less table

A dining room chandelier

Having the cable line put through the wall (my mission is to have zero visible cords…they are the bane of my existence)

Window treatments

Rugs

Art

General styling…you know…making it pretty

I also plan on wall-mounting the TV and maybe putting a small shelf above it?  Not sure yet.

Also, yes, there is packing tape on the back corner of the couch, so the cats won’t use it as a scratching post.

I am pretty proud because every piece of furniture in the room with the exception of the white Ikea Besta unit on the wall, is craigslisted, ebayed, or thrifted.  Even the couch and the dining table.  I don’t want to jinx it, but I am hopefully buying some ebayed dining room chairs very soon!  I have been in the process of building this collection of furniture for a few years, and now it finally has a place to live.

I’ll hash out the sordid details of our painting/priming escapades next…

So all over our house we have this “lovely” (ugly) sprayed on texture.  I have also heard this called a knock down coat or spray texture.  It is more than a little sand texture and less rough than a popcorn ceiling texture, but still pretty thick.

I loathe this texture.  I think it makes the walls look cheap.  I wanted nice smooth walls.  Jeff didn’t so much care, and voted to just paint over the texture and live with it.  But I whined enough and he gave in

After prowling the internet for answers, it seemed that there were three options: remove the texture, fill in the texture to make it flat, or re-drywall the whole house.  Since option 3 was just not going to happen, I researched options 1 and 2, and found out that filling in the texture…i.e. skim coating the walls, was the way to go.

I decided to give this skim coating a try inside of our closet first.  I figured that if I screwed it up, its only a closet, right?  So I watched some youtube tutorials and gave it my best shot.

Here are the basics supplies of skim coating: A knife (I used a 10″ wide one), a hawk (the tray thing), and a crap load of joint compound.  Joint compound comes in both powder form and ready-to-use form, but novices should use the ready mixed kind (or so I read).

I tried my hand at the closet, and found out that it is not hard, but it is time consuming and exhausting.  It took me all weekend to coat, sand, coat, sand, coat, sand, prime, prime, paint, paint.  If you followed all of that, it took 3 coats of the joint compound over this texture to smooth it out, and even then, it still had some imperfections. It also takes 2 coats of primer over the skim coating because dried joint compound drinks primer like a frat boy drinks beer.  Therefore, we couldn’t handle this project on our own…it was time to call the professionals.

So here is our skim coater Caesar…I tried to be all covert in snapping pics of him working so he wouldn’t think I was  a weirdo.  Please pardon the bad phone pics:

It was validating to see that he did the skim coating the same way I did it in the closet.  We had him do both the living room and the hallway, which is A.LOT of wall area.  Also that wall eats up A.LOT of joint compound.

Bonus of the skim coating – not only did it flatten the walls, but eliminate the scary red walls.  Yeah for a 2 for 1 deal!

Remember the room before…

And after:

So you aren’t confused, we actually did the skim coating before we stained the beams (but after stripping and sanding them).  That way, we could clean up all of the dust from the sanding (both the beams and the walls) so it wouldn’t screw up any painting/staining.

Also note the holes high on the walls of the above pic…that is from our electrician installing the overhead wiring.  Ceasar patched those, too.

Once this coat dried, then came the task of sanding—and it is not a perfect science.  It is actually hard to tell which areas need more work until after the first coat of primer.  After we primed, we found a number of areas that needed extra love.  Like this…

That does not make my little perfectionist heart happy.  In areas like this, we ended up doing another coat/sand cycle.  In all honesty, it is still not perfect in many places.  Although you don’t notice it unless you stand 6 inches away from the wall.  We could have probably done even another coat in certain places, but we had to call it quits at some point – the white layer of dust on everything in the house got really obnoxious.

Another note about joint compound: it is VERY stinky.  It also has a very “onion” like effect on your eyes – making them sting and water.  We actually had to go sit outside until it dried because it was so nasty.  Once it dried, however, it had no lasting effects.

So that is the story of making our bumpy walls (fairly) smooth.   Priming and painting next!

To continue on with the epic AC story, we fast forward to the day of install.  The guys from Cool Air USA were here bright and early.  Super lame name for a company.  Their logo rips off Ice Age (the movie).  But I have to give it to them–these guys were good.  While the install took four times longer than estimated, they stuck it out and got it done.

First they removed the old unit, both inside and out.

That is our still-newish-to-us-but-defective condenser ready to be loaded on the truck.  Adios, freon leak!

Once they removed the interior air handler and the closet was empty, that was our cue to get to work.  We were in a time crunch, so we didn’t take any progress photos, but we installed a piece of drywall on the back wall of the closet where we had just built the new wall.  That finished off the closet so there were no holes.  Then we taped and mudded all of the corner joints and screw holes, which actually wasn’t that bad.  We should have waited a few hours for the mud to dry, but we couldn’t, so after about 15 minutes we put a coat of primer to make it “seem” finished.

It is really sad when the AC closet is the most finished room in the house.

While we were busy doing that, the AC guys were busy installing the outdoor unit.

They were also cutting a large hole in the bathroom wall to install a new vent.

Which apparently I was in charge of patching.  Good thing we had some extra sheetrock on hand.

Looks a little ghetto, right?  Nothing a little joint compound (three layers, to be exact) and some skills with a knife, 2 coats of primer and 2 coats of paint can’t fix.  See?

Seriously, I can’t even tell.  I was pretty proud of my work on this one.

And after an afternoon of excruciating heat and humidity, we had a working AC system.  And let me tell you, these guys worked their asses off.

(Pardon the bad photo).  It is a 16 SEER Rheem unit, which will supposedly run 4 times more efficient than our old unit.  We will also get a $300 federal tax credit next year.  Kind of softens the blow of this savings-draining expense.  Kind of.

Plus, I love the retro coolness of the Rheem logo.

Seems mid-century appropriate.  I approve.

This is part 1 of the AC saga. 

Weather in South Florida during the summer (and most of fall)  tends to get a little toasty.  Hot, humid, and general miserableness.  Air conditioning is kind of a necessity.  When we were buying the house, the exterior AC condenser was stolen, and before closing, we had to pay to replace the unit.  At the time, we decided it would be best to pay as little money as possible in case the sale didn’t go through.  Therefore, we bought a used AC condenser and had it installed (which I talked about here) which allowed us to pass inspection and close on the house.  Of course, there were no guarantees as to how long this would last, but we figured we could  get at least a year out of it and figure out what to do next.

Ha. Not so. 

When you come home from work at 5pm and the thermostat reads 94 degrees in the house, something isn’t working right.  After researching and getting some estimates for new AC systems, as well as talking to a consultant from our electric company who does free home energy surveys, we determined there were 3 problems:

1. The outside compressor had a leak in the coolant line.  That caused the screen behind the filter to acquire a nice sheet of ice if it ran for longer than an hour without a break, rendering the AC ineffective.

2. The inside air handler coils had probably never been cleaned in 14 years, and had so much dust and dirt that it was running at under 25% efficiency.

3. We have lovely open beam ceilings that I love so much, but this also comes with the problem of having no roof insulation.  Literally all that is separating my bed from the hot Florida sun is a layer of 1×6 tongue and groove boards, tar, and asphalt rolled on roofing.  Like, when we replaced the broken smoke detector and unscrewed the bracket from the ceiling, we could see the sky through the screw holes.  Then we had to patch the roof with tar so water wouldn’t end up in a puddle in the living room.  Super fun, as you might imagine.

Getting a new AC unit would cure both problems 1 and 2, and would be 1/3 the cost of curing problem 3.  We can only deal with one problem at a time, so new AC unit it is. 

We thought this would be a relatively easy problem: out with the old, in with the new, hook it up, and presto, cold air.  That is, until all 3 companies we got estimates from told us that the closet that held our air handler was too shallow to hold a modern high-efficiency unit.  We would have to expand the back wall of the closet one foot, taking a foot out of the guest room closet.  Fortunately, of all of the places to have to knock down a wall, this was the most ideal location. 

Nothing like some good old fashioned demolition to relieve some stress. 

This is the old air handler in the closet.  It is the age of a ninth grader, which means it needs to retire. 

Since we obviously couldn’t demo through the existing air handler, we had to start from the guest closet behind it. 

We started by pounding some holes in the drywall and removed the first layer which was relatively easy and painless.  To our surprise, we found another finished wall underneath.  From what I could determine, when they installed the unit 14 years ago, they furred out the walls of the closet to hide the drain line, which runs through the wall to the outside of the house.  The wall underneath was the original closet wall (pink crayon marks and all). 

(more after the break)

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I am nearing the end of Beam Staining Extravaganza 2011.  This is a messy, gunky process and makes me thankful for latex paint.  Because seriously?  How did they do it with oil-based paint? 

I do not claim to be a staining expert, but I picked up a few tips along the way.  Like wear gloves.  You will still get stain underneath your fingernails, but it will be less messy with gloves.  Before I expand on more helpful hints, here is my process:

First, we taped off the newly painted ceiling to minimize getting stain anywhere other than on the beams.  I made sure to let the ceiling deck dry as long as possible (48 hours at least) before taping just to make sure none of the paint would peel off with the tape.  

Our staining weapon of choice is Minwax Gel Stain in Hickory.  Because this home renovation process is full of trial and error–lots of error, in fact–I started out with regular liquid stain, but putting it on a vertical surface was messy – drips everywhere, uneven blotchiness, and overall ineffectiveness.  I did a little research online and decided to give the gel stain a try, because it is good for vertical applications.  From my experience with this process, I would do gel stain in the future for everything.  Sure it is a bit more messy, but it is an even, foolproof application process and at least in this case, only requires one coat. 

Here is a little pictoral depiction of the application process…

Start with an unstained section (sanded and cleaned with TSP cleaner).  Below you can see the difference between the unstained and stained .  In real life, there is a much more dramatic difference, especially from further away.  You’ll also notice some bleed through of the white ceiling paint onto the top edge of the beam.  I kind of freaked out a bit and throught I would have to go along the edge of the beams with a razor blade.  However, the stain actually covers up any imperfections in the white edge and creates a clean line, especially from far away. 

I begin applying the gel stain with the grain of the wood.

I use an el cheapo 79 cent brush that I can toss after because cleaning a brush after a day in this junk is impossible. 

The stain is the consistency of melted chocolate and goes on pretty much like a thin coat of paint. 

It is important to get a pretty thick coat (as thick as it will go without dripping) because otherwise it can dry out too fast.  The key is to wipe it off before it dries out.  The package says to wait 3 minutes, but I found that in working on about 2-3 foot sections at a time, by the time you are done applying it, you can start wiping it off where you started.

When wiping off the stain, you just take a painters cloth rag (thin t-shirt material) and wipe all of the junk off.  I found it helpful to have 2 rags — one to get the majority of the wetness off, and a cleaner rag to take a second pass at the beam. 

I did have a few times where the stain actually dried before I could wipe it off.  Usually in front of the AC vent or when I tried to do too large of a section at once.  In that case, the rag wouldn’t glide across to clean off the excess stain because it was already sticky and drying on the beam.  I found that wiping with some low odor mineral spirits took the excess stain right off without changing the color.  The package does not tell you this, by the way.  Yay for a trial and error that actually worked without error. 

After the beam is all wiped off, it is done!  That simple. 

 The wood didn’t start out perfect, so it isn’t a perfect application, but the imperfections seem acceptable in a 60 year old house.  Many of the beams were not a consistent color to begin with, but the gel stain appears to stain them all to a uniform color. 

After the stain, I will put on a coat of Wipe-on Poly in a satin finish, which will just seal the stain onto the wood.  I am letting the wood sit before I apply this because I was all excited and jumped the gun and wanted to apply this after a few hours and the poly started removing some of the stain.  Only after that I read the package that said to wait 24 hours before applying the poly.  Oops.  Then I had to re-sand down that portion of wood and restain it. 

Lesson learned.  Read directions first. 

Here is the finished product.  Please ignore the walls and the one brown smudge that needs to be touched up on the ceiling deck.