Paint and floor progress

Everything is moving along swimmingly! The entire interior is almost painted, including kitchen cupboards, and the floor guys filled holes upstairs and did most of the sanding up there yesterday. Today, they will finish sanding the upstairs and lay down the first layer of oil finish. That means I can't go upstairs anymore for at least a week!

Since they will start the downstairs tomorrow, and I realized I'll be kicked out of the house for several days, I thought I'd snap a few progress pictures for your delectation. Here, they are shown as "before" and "during" shots. Unfortunately, I can't get to the house easily in the daytime so the "during" pics lack the beautiful natural light in the befores. But I hope you can see the improvements!

Living room before

Living room in progress: door trim is now white like the rest of the house, and the sconces are higher on the wall. I really want to make a stained glass window for the transom!

Kitchen before. The wall color is a cream with a greenish tinge. Not flattering.

Kitchen during: Walls are painted a lovely cream, cabinets are a brighter white above and a dark purply-brown below. Small wrinkle: the screw holes for the hinges AND the handles don't match the originals, so all the holes needed to be filled.

Front bedroom (sewing room) before

Sewing room during: baseboard heaters and covers are gone, revealing the beautiful high baseboards. Walls are painted a lovely light green, trim is a much brighter white, floors have been sanded, and there's a new outlet visible in the picture.

Back bedroom before

Back bedroom during: floors mostly sanded, heating gone, lovely cream paint on the walls. I've removed damaged shoe molding at various spots in the house and will replace it after the floors are done.

Hall before.

Hall during. You can see a new heating vent in the ceiling at the end of the hall. Lighter paint on the walls, floors sanded. The floor guys' equipment is where the window seat will be. They cut out the floorboards there to patch the heating pipe holes. There were at least 19 such holes to be patched throughout the house.

I'll end with one more picture that is not a before/during. This shows the condition of the baseboards behind the heating pipes (this is actually one of the better spots) as well as the floor patching in progress. You can see in the sub-floor the round holes that were also in the white oak floorboards. The floor guys were planning to put round plugs in, but when I came by to check things out yesterday, they had decided to put board pieces in, which is much nicer!

What you are NOT seeing in these pictures is all the wonderful prep work the painters did on the plaster walls. They look remarkably smooth for plaster. You can only truly see that in person.