Cast your memory back a month or so to remember where we started:
A few weeks ago I started with removing and painting all the doors, so those have been sitting idly waiting for the rest of it to get done to put them back on. It took me all of one evening just to move all the books off the shelves and all the movies and stuff inside the cabinets to a different location in the house. Unfortunately, I thought the best place for it was upstairs :( I guess that was my exercise for the day?
Once I got it all cleared off, here's what the blank canvas looked like after it was all taped off and ready for painting:
The first half of Day One was spent priming the whole thing with this super-intense bonding and sealing primer that I mentioned in a previous post. I knew it was serious stuff with potential for stinkiness, but I don't think I had truly appreciated the number of brain cells that I believe I burned in the process of using it. I was incredibly thankful that I had waited until it was truly warm enough to open up every single window in the house - and even then, I felt like I was getting stupider.
In this process I also learned quite a bit about the usage and disposal of mineral spirits, which are basically paint thinner. Scary stuff! If my house accidentally blows up one of these days, you'll know why.
For the second half of Day One, I painted the first coat of topcoat on the top half of the bookcase. My plan was to get the top half done first so that I can put the TV and lamps back up there and hopefully clear up at least some of the junk floating around my house at the moment. That, and...I miss my TV. So here's where Day One left off:
On Day Two, I spent the first half of the day doing a second coat on the top half and a first coat on the bottom half.
After a couple days, things were going well, but it was also really exhausting work. My arms were both pretty sore, and I was losing patience with the whole thing. But on the upside, I really liked how it was starting to look, so I tried to use that as motivation to keep calm and carry on.
I won't bother showing you the pictures from Day Three and Day Four because the camera doesn't really pick up the differences, but all in all, it ended up taking four coats to get the interior part of the top half up to snuff and three coats to finish up the bottom half. Yikes. What I learned was that if I could have used a roller on more of it I think it would have gone faster and also the paint coverage would have been better. But there just wasn't really room on the insides of the shelves on top, so I just had to use a paint brush, which ended up taking all those coats to not look streaky. Maybe the real lesson here is that I'm just a sucky painter?
Anyway, after getting the main body of the bookcase finished up yesterday and letting it dry overnight, I put the doors back on and here we are.
Where are the shelves, you may be wondering? Well, that will be this week's project. I've started on a few of them, but as with the doors, it will be slow work because of the two sides and all the drying time involved. Should be ready to go soon, though!
In the process of hanging up the doors, though, I've been reminded of one of my main issues with the bookcase, which is the crooked hanging doors. I wasn't sure exactly what the problem was, so I thought that by simply taking them off and re-hanging them, I could at least hope to eliminate that issue as the possible source of the problem, but it didn't work. It might be something that requires a second person to hold steady and level while the other person puts in the screws. About three of the doors are still wonky, as you can see below:
The other two options for what's going wrong (I think) are that the holes for the screws that hold the hinges onto the frame could be drilled in the wrong place in a couple of instances, and the other is that the hinges themselves could be off somehow. I was thinking about replacing the hinges anyway, because the previous owners just painted right over them when they did the last paint job on the bookcase, rather than taking them off when they did the painting. So now there's remnants of the old paint color on each of the hinges on the doors. It's not enough to keep me awake at night, but it just doesn't look very profesh, and I didn't want to paint over them and compound the problem with the hinges. So that will be something to tackle in a future edition of these bookcase posts.
To sum up: I'm very happy with the way the white paint looks on the bookcase. Hooray for that! But there's still some work to be done, including finishing and replacing the shelves, re-hanging the cabinet doors, and finding a better way to hide all the cords. Sigh. I'll post more pictures when the shelves are up and everything's back where it belongs!
No comments:
Post a Comment