Sun Room

Before fixing the living room, I thought I would quickly paint the sun room and redo the floor.

The sun room has 12 old, double-hung windows, and lots of trim. We wanted the parts not covered by trim to be yellow, but the correct shade was elusive, so there are at least three different shades of yellow, along with a kind of salmony pink that I never painted over because the two radiators were blocking me. The radiators were pretty well stuck. Fortunately, I have lots of WD-40, and some very large pipe wrenches that were originally used to assemble battleships at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The ceiling is beadboard, and I just read somewhere that porch ceilings are often painted blue; specifically, haint blue, a light blue green color that supposedly wards off evil spirits. As much as I like that idea, I'm just going to give it a fresh coat of ceiling white paint.

The trim throughout the entire house is pure white, and that's what I'm painting the trim in the sun room. In many parts of the lower section, it looked like the previous owners had simply painted over whatever dirt happened to be in the way, but that's not how I do things. I sanded the rough spots and discovered that at one point the trim in the sun room had been painted red! Yikes!

One thing I've been doing, which is exactly the opposite of what the painting books tell you to do, is to paint the trim first, then paint the walls. There are several reasons why I think this is the better method.

• When painting trim with semi-gloss paint, the brush strokes are more noticeable, so applying it first allows more degrees of freedom. (Flat paint is less fussy.)
• It's much easier to cut in against the trim because it sticks out from the wall.
• If you overlap some of the trim paint onto the wall it forms a seal, which makes the trim easier to clean.

The only reason I can think of for painting the trim last is concern that a roller used on the wall might spatter paint onto the trim, but in practice, I haven't found this to be a problem.

I haven't gotten to the floor yet, and I might get sidetracked into painting the sashes. (They just look so dinghy next to the freshly painted trim.)

And pictures! Well, maybe I'll save that for the LEGO post.