Tag: ceiling

Basement Ceiling Painting

March 17, 2016 / / 0 Comments

We’re planning to live in the basement while we finish the other two main floors of the house at the same time. Eventually we plan to put insulation between the joists and install a drop ceiling in the basement. We also plan to insulate and drywall the exterior walls. However, because we know there will be ongoing work to run electrical, plumbing, and HVAC to the other floors, plus we’re putting in a couple of temporary walls for bedrooms, we can’t really put that in yet. At the same time, we don’t want to have the dark exposed joists and subfloor for a ceiling while we’re living in the basement. The solution is to paint the joists and the underside of the subfloor. There are other reasons to do this as well. We used a sealing primer that is mold and mildew resistant, and we used a flame retardant additive that gives it a Class A fire rating. If the paint is exposed to fire, it will char and create a protective barrier that prevents the wood from catching on fire.

Sarah painting

Sarah painting

Because we’re planning to stain and seal the concrete, we wanted to do the painting before the floor was poured. The paint sprayer has a way of coating everything in a mist of paint that wouldn’t be fun to remove and it’s a large space to put down drop cloths. It was a good thing we did because the flame retardant makes the paint thinner than usual, and when we started spraying the paint dripped off the rough sawn lumber rather than soaking in. We discovered that a roller works a lot better than the sprayer to get the paint worked into the wood, but even so it was going to take more than one coat and the roller was way too slow.

Slow progress
First coat with sprayer
In Progress
Second sprayer coat

We went back to using the paint sprayer, but in light passes. Even so, it went through five gallon buckets of paint fast. It took three coats to get to an acceptable level, and we went through fifteen gallons of paint in the process. After all of that, there are still places where the dark wood peeks through and other spots where the wood stained the paint yellow. Ultimately, it’s a basement. Nearly all of this will be covered up by the drop ceiling when we eventually finish it, and it’s a big improvement over how it looked before.

 

Slow, Varied Progress

July 7, 2011 / / 6 Comments

Leveling the Toilet

I’ve been trying to finish a project so that I can write about it, but so far things have been going slowly and with several projects in flight at once, we’re not getting any one thing completely finished. Another challenge is that we’ve wound up having to do a lot of things that weren’t in the original plan. I knew the toilet wasn’t attached in the upstairs bathroom, but hooking it up has turned into an extensive bathroom project. Once it’s done I’ll cover it in a post, but for now enjoy the picture of the level toilet and the not-level floor.

During the toilet escapade I wound up having to re-mount the bathroom pedestal sink to the wall and redo the drain. That’s finally complete, but it took much longer than anticipated because I didn’t have the right parts or tools and as always it took multiple trips to the store to resolve it. The good news is that’s at least finished. We have a working and not leaking sink upstairs, which helps quite a bit.

Bathroom in progress

We’ve been re-tiling the floor in the upstairs kitchen, which Sarah will be posting about once it’s done. We’ve been fumigating and baiting the roaches with limited success (they are incredibly resilient, as you know), but are probably going to bring in an exterminator. The drop ceiling and track lighting in the back bedroom upstairs is down, another round of garbage bins have been emptied and re-filled in a day, though the backlog is starting to diminish.

Removing the lighting in the bedroom was interesting. They’d added a light switch in the wall, but it was just wired into the receptacle, which is also where several outlets were wired in. After we used the tester to get the circuit turned off I disconnected and re-wired it. The results as usual aren’t pretty but they’re a substantial improvement over what was there.

Ceiling receptacle

We now need to strip the cracked paint, clean the walls, bevel the top of the drywall that they put over the plaster with joint compound so that it blends in somewhat, tape everything off, and eventually paint. Then we can install carpeting and a ceiling fan and the room will be ready. Since this is just one room, and one of the simpler ones at that, I’m not feeling optimistic about moving in by the end of the month.