Paint, Counter-Paint

We're back to painting. Upstairs, Kathy is painting her office/study. Downstairs, Jim is working on the trim around the downstairs bathrooms.

Kathy's space has always been baby blue, but the long-term plan was to paint it light brown. After almost five years, we finally got around to it. Here is the darker of the two brown colors going on under the "witch's cap" on the top floor.

Meanwhile, down in the commercial kitchen, we also wanted to paint the small space in between the two public restrooms. The walls there had seen a lot of damage, first when the DPO (damned previous owner) added electrical conduit all over the walls, and again when we removed it. There was a lot of patching and filling going on, mostly with plaster of paris over the old original lath-and-plaster. The repairs left of lot of irregular unpainted areas. But nothing a can of paint can't fix.

That part was easy enough -- so easy, Kathy let me paint it by myself. But you know how one thing leads to another...?

The trim around the doorway here was always kind of second-rate. It was simple four-inch molding, not the nicely detailed stuff that's in most of the other parts of the house. It was okay, but not great. I remember last year I'd spent a lot of time sanding it smooth and caulking around the edges, thinking someday I'd paint it. Now that it's paint time, I wasn't so sure.

At first, my cunning plan was to use the router to cut some shallow grooves in the trim to make it look nicer. But that would mean cobbling together some straightedges along the wall to guide the router. That's a lot of work, plus it'll make holes in the wall I just painted. Better to take the trim down and work it on the router table. And as long as I'm removing the trim...

You remember when we redecorated the men's room we took down the original molding from that doorway (above)? The DPO had cut it down to a smaller size, and it was all covered in faded, dirty wine labels. We tossed that trim into the back of garage. Hey, I wonder if I can reuse that stuff...

My friend Jasco and I spent two solid days stripping wine labels and layers of paint. After about six applications, some of the original wood started to show through. There's no way it was going to be clean enough to stain, but at least we could remove some of the accumulated paint.

For the record, I counted four different paint colors in about six layers. There was a dark yellowish brown, dark battleship gray/blue on top of that, and two versions of white on top of that. The wine labels were applied over the most recent layer of white paint.


But the trim had been butchered, ripped down both sides to make it narrower to fit in the bathroom. One of the decorative rosettes had been cut almost in half. To restore it, I got some redwood pieces left over from another project and cut them to size. With a little practice and a variety of router bits, I managed to recreate the missing part of the trim profile and glued it onto the edges of the original molding. Some sandpaper and wood filler took care of the gaps.  I left a couple of the old nail holes unfilled so that it wouldn't look over-restored.

Now that it's primed it doesn't look too bad, if I do say so. The edges of this trim are all new. Ironically, I put the primer on thick so it wouldn't look like new paint over new wood. I'm hoping the gloppiness will help make it look older, like the rest of the trim.