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Problem-solving on the fly – Not this again!
“Do you ever have déjà vu, Mrs. Lancaster?” “I don’t think so, but I could check with the kitchen.” -Groundhog Day – 1993 It’s always nice when things fall neatly into place, but quite often it seems that will not be the case because the house throws you a curveball or three and suddenly it’s as if you’re stuck in the Groundhog’s Day of home remodeling. Since we started on this house 3 1/2 years ago, we’ve learned more than our fair share of lessons the difficult way. Not for lack of trying mind you, more so due to … what we will call a lack of information.…
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Spackle & Sand 2.0
It’s day #22,147,895 of remodeling here at Parkside. As of late, it’s been a seemingly never-ending repetition of spackle and sanding. We’ve just started in on our 4th? 5th? 5-gallon bucket of drywall mud. The drop cloths are being washed for the second time in a week and my floors are covered in a fine white dust from sanding which makes me wonder if they’ll ever be clean again. The hubby and I spent a good portion of our weekend working in the hopes that we’ll get one step closer to painting (the paint that’s been sitting in our someday-rec room/current storage of whatever room since Memorial Day weekend.) And while…
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Living the spackler’s life
Progress on the house hasn’t been booming. We hit what I’d guess would be a lull or maybe a slump after vacation and now we’re slowly crawling back out. Slump aside, I’m starting to feel like we’ll never get past the spackle and sand phase of the renovation. Ceilings, walls, patch here, more walls. Someone save me from the madness! Our current project – the one we’ve been at for awhile now – is corner bead spackling. The corner beads are pretty much all mounted so now the task of mudding over to make them smooth and even with the wall. It’s not SO terrible really, just a slow process…
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Wall Skimming 2.0: More lessons to learn
So 20 YouTube videos and 2 skimmed walls later, the hubby and I are total pros at this now. If only. At this point, I’d say we’re semi-capable DIY-ers who are having lots of fun with our hands-on learning. Here’s a list of things we’ve learned so far: 1. Consistency matters. There doesn’t seem to be a set formula for determining how much water to mix into the drywall mud i.e. 1/2 c. water to 1 g. of drywall joint compound. YouTube and DIY blogs have recommended the thickness be somewhere between mayonnaise and creamy peanut butter. Real talk here: I love that people are using condiments as a reference for mud thickness. I mean, how…
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Skimming the Walls and Other Lessons in Drywall Mudding
Ah, wall skimming. Sometimes, it’s not enough to spackle the dents and holes in your walls. Sometimes, there are just too many to deal little marks and dents to deal with and trying to cover each one individually is just plain tedious. I present for your viewing pleasure, Exhibit A (left side) the wall in our soon to be the rec room. This little beauty comes pretty much as is – minus a few attempts to spackle over the dents in the wall we have done nothing to it. Exhibit B (right side) is a wall in our hallway we have spackled again and again and then finally painted in…
