basement painting
Sep. 25th, 2009 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7So I decided to paint my basement. It is a grungy aqua color, heavily darkened with mildew along the west wall. On Tuesday night I skipped practice to scrub down the northwest corner with bleach, getting all the mildew off; on Wednesday I coated the cleaned area with primer. Today I scrubbed the entire rest of the western wall with bleach, let it dry, primered it, let it dry, and painted the upper half of the northern wall with three coats of yellow paint left over from the living room. (Dated August 2007 on the lid by the guy who mixed it. Still good!) I also gave the entire western wall (which is twenty-six feet long and made of concrete) a coat of leftover white outdoor paint from the garage. That west wall has the worst moisture problem, I think-- it had worse mildew than anywhere else, at any rate. So outdoor paint it is.
I have solid plans to turn that northwest corner into a sewing room. Having the wall yellow on top and blue on the bottom would be pleasant and cheerful and also would hide any mildew that returned. The western wall, I am very seriously considering insulating with curtains. I'm thinking of applying a wooden strip, possibly two-by-four or so, along the upper part of the wall, and then hanging curtain rods from it, and from that, hanging insulated curtains. I have a whole pile of old curtains from my mother, which I could use with some alteration-- I'd already been using them to wall off the northwest corner with the space heater for plant-starting. As time/budget allows, I could replace them with more recently-fashionable and less sun-faded fabric. (I could even simply apply the new fashion fabric over the top of them, and keep them as an insulating layer.)
My budget for this project is pretty precisely $0, so, so far so good. I ran out of primer just as I was about to finish, so I eked it out to the important bits. If I can't find the remaining blue paint (or if there isn't enough), I'll make do with purple. I have Contingency plans. And I can make a cozy setup down there pretty much entirely with existing furniture. So that's the plan.
Yes, despite recent acquisitions of lovely material objects, I do remain quite poor. Z got paid today, which was an excitingly large sum of money, but it was the money for... July, in which he was busy. In September he has had almost no work, and has had to send his computer off for expensive repairs, so I'm expecting a lean Christmas. Hopefully everyone wants homemade sewed things made out of other things I picked apart. But I'm not worried-- I've always been a shitty gift-giver, to be frank, and so if I did actually make everyone things out of other things, they'd be shocked and possibly pleased. Which would be an achievement, for me.
However. I have been fabulously productive on this, my first day off of three (see? Looking on the bright side-- the dark side is that I was given so few hours this week I'm going to be very sorry come next payday), so I am enjoying a nice glass of wine and feeling smugly pleased with myself. The basement will be transformed from a weird and creepy dingy place to somewhere usable, and that will be a nice thing.
... I have a creeping suspicion I've already discussed this here, but my half-bottle of wine says not to worry about it and urges me to go ahead and post this.
I have solid plans to turn that northwest corner into a sewing room. Having the wall yellow on top and blue on the bottom would be pleasant and cheerful and also would hide any mildew that returned. The western wall, I am very seriously considering insulating with curtains. I'm thinking of applying a wooden strip, possibly two-by-four or so, along the upper part of the wall, and then hanging curtain rods from it, and from that, hanging insulated curtains. I have a whole pile of old curtains from my mother, which I could use with some alteration-- I'd already been using them to wall off the northwest corner with the space heater for plant-starting. As time/budget allows, I could replace them with more recently-fashionable and less sun-faded fabric. (I could even simply apply the new fashion fabric over the top of them, and keep them as an insulating layer.)
My budget for this project is pretty precisely $0, so, so far so good. I ran out of primer just as I was about to finish, so I eked it out to the important bits. If I can't find the remaining blue paint (or if there isn't enough), I'll make do with purple. I have Contingency plans. And I can make a cozy setup down there pretty much entirely with existing furniture. So that's the plan.
Yes, despite recent acquisitions of lovely material objects, I do remain quite poor. Z got paid today, which was an excitingly large sum of money, but it was the money for... July, in which he was busy. In September he has had almost no work, and has had to send his computer off for expensive repairs, so I'm expecting a lean Christmas. Hopefully everyone wants homemade sewed things made out of other things I picked apart. But I'm not worried-- I've always been a shitty gift-giver, to be frank, and so if I did actually make everyone things out of other things, they'd be shocked and possibly pleased. Which would be an achievement, for me.
However. I have been fabulously productive on this, my first day off of three (see? Looking on the bright side-- the dark side is that I was given so few hours this week I'm going to be very sorry come next payday), so I am enjoying a nice glass of wine and feeling smugly pleased with myself. The basement will be transformed from a weird and creepy dingy place to somewhere usable, and that will be a nice thing.
... I have a creeping suspicion I've already discussed this here, but my half-bottle of wine says not to worry about it and urges me to go ahead and post this.
