mattbelcher.com

All of you are no doubt thinking that my last post wasn't bloggy enough and Matt banned me from posting here again. But I can sneak onto his computer where the password is saved! Bwa-ha-ha!

The real reason I haven't been posting is that, despite an obscene amount of scraping and sanding, there hasn't been much progress. Until yesterday. Yesterday I got (ta-DA!) a new toy.

Here it is, a Skil brand random orbit sander. This is not to be confused with an orbital sander like the 1/4-sheet sander I already had, although I was confused. Actually the random orbit sanders are also orbital sanders (more general), but the sandpaper rotates as well as orbiting. Apparently there aren't enough words in the English language. More here on power sanders. Helpful if you don't like to feel like an idiot at the hardware store.

Moving on, once I had this tool I applied it to the cabinets that Matt and I had been scraping and sanding for a week. That's when I found out it was The Tool For The Job. I had suspected this before I bought it, but I am glad to find out that it is, in fact, The Tool For The Job. The upshot of this discovery is this post, 48 hours later.

Speaking of The Tool For The Job, Matt's dad also sent us a box of tile-laying tools from when they did their house.

Another thing I did yesterday is find our countertop. Long story short: we had a countertop that we got for free, but they didn't have matching pieces in stock right now, so I ended up buying new stock countertop for the whole project. The nice thing about this is I got to pick a color myself instead of going with what we found for free. The bad thing is now I'll have to cut my own sink hole. (Sink hole. Makes me think of scuba diving. Except this is much hotter.) Anyway, here's the countertop:

I almost remembered to take a before picture today. That is, I took it after painting only a couple of surfaces. You can see here how much of the paint ended up peeling away, so we couldn't just paint over the old paint. Hence the week's scraping and sanding:

You can also see here how much of the paint wouldn't come off. It was a very difficult process, but I think the final result is pretty nice:

This took three coats of paint, one more than the walls, mostly because of how much bare wood I was starting from. I used the leftover flat paint from the ceiling as a primer and the last two coats are semi-gloss. You can start to see the cream/red look here as a tiny bit of the red wall is in the background.

Speaking of walls, I've also been trying to fill in the giganto hole in the sheetrock (our house is too old for drywall) with regular old plaster. This is not recommended for such large holes, but since sheetrock is only about 1/8 inch thick it seems to be working. There are more pics in the kitchen album, including one of how they used to make phone jacks a really long time ago. I think we'll be looking for an actual wall jack to replace that at some point.