Trim

We are putting the trim boards that were in the house back on now that the walls are finished.  But first, loose peeling old paint has to be scraped off.  It's been fun to discover what color the trim used to be.  We peeled through a red layer, several white layers, some black, all the way down to a stubborn mauve color that doesn't peel.  

Brandon was lucky enough to get to do the really long and wide base boards.  It's a good thing he likes making messes.  

Notice that the door was once yellow, and now has a flaky coat of white on top.  Someone told me that you can tell lead paint because it cracks in an alligator skin pattern.  That's one scary door.  

Thankfully the upstairs trim doesn't have peeling paint, so while Brandon was making a mess downstairs, I spent some lovely time staring out the windows upstairs... I mean, painting window trim upstairs.  

It took me all day just to do around the windows, and I barely got started on the rest of the room.  It's waiting for me to come back though.  I can feel it.  Trim.

I'm not sure where this handy paint cup came from, but it has a magnet on the side that holds the brush out of the paint.  I've painted a lot of rooms in my life, and this cup is far superior to a paper cup or an old margarine tub, for sure.  I feel like I've graduated to a new class of trim painter with my fancy painting cup!

I'm hopeful that we've plugged enough holes with all of our renovations that the cluster flies can no longer get in the house.  I have this hope because the day I painted the window trim upstairs, there wasn't a single dopey fly crawling on the glass.  Several wasps, but no flies.  I washed all the fly poop off the glass and the sills and gave everything a new coat of paint.  I've got my fingers crossed that the days of sucking hundreds of flies out of the windows with the shop vac are over!