Finishing the Great Room

Welcome back to our home renovation! This time we will be finishing the great room and the office, hopefully.

The last couple episodes have been on making the trim for the windows, which were built as separate units that can be finished prepped, finished, and then installed. I’ve already finished prepped a couple of these, but this last one needs to be sanded and caulked still. 

Next, time to paint all of this trim. I’m using a conversion varnish, which has a base and then a hardener that you mix into it. It should dry pretty quickly since it’s lacquer, and that allows me to put the coats on fairly quickly. I’ll be using the same product for all the cabinets and baseboards as well. 

Next I’m going to go through and sand everything to get the fuzziness and frayed fibers off of there. Then another session of spraying for final coats. 

Here’s all the trim with a few coats on it. The cap moldings took the most work, they have about three coats on them because they needed the most sanding and finessing. But they are looking good, so these are all good to go!

Now it’s time to put the primer on the walls and ceiling. I’m hoping that I can get through painting the walls today as well, and then tomorrow I can start installing the trim. 

Here is the room all primed, which took a lot of work and four hours. It’s a lot of climbing and and down the scaffold, moving it, spraying a little, and then moving it to the next section. I couldn’t imagine trying to do this with a roller. 

After letting the primer dry, I started painting the walls. Here they are with two coats now, and it’s looking good. 

Now I can get the window units installed. 

I have the base installed in about half of the room now, and I’ve installed the cap on all of the pieces that are not going to get coped into a corner. Over here I have one piece of shoe molding cut, just to give an idea of how the layout will look. I’ll fill all of the bottom holes in the base before I put the cap on since it’ll be a lot easier to sand those flush before the cap goes on. 

Next up, I’ll install the shoe molding. I don’t care too much for shoe molding, and at my old house, I scribed the baseboard to the floor and didn’t use any sort of shoe mold. I really liked that look, it was very clean, but in this case I think the shoe mold is needed because these baseboards are so tall. 

Now to switch gears: I have some patching to do on the flooring over here. 

All patched now, and it’s nice not having a giant hole in the walkway. 

Now it’s time to install the window casings permanently. 

Now that they are installed, I can get them painted. 

Next I’m going to move on to the ceiling. You might be asking why I’m doing the ceiling last, and the short answer is that it’s easier to mask a line on the wall than it is to mask a line on the ceiling. If you’re thinking “Why don’t you paint the walls last? Roll it and then cut in with a brush along the seams.” That would leave me with the result I’m trying to avoid. There are seams all over the place in this room, and there’s not really a truly straight line. It becomes painfully obvious at all of those intersections where the paint color changes. So I’ll be able to mask off a straighter line than is there right now. That line will probably deviate between being technically on the ceiling vs on the wall, but it’ll be straighter. 

The ceiling is at 50% of the pigment of the wall, just like I did in the kitchen. That should also help mask a little bit of the unevenness going from the walls to the slopes where my actual seam tape line is. 

And finally: it’s all done! When we bought this property, we really fell in love with the land and the scenery. This room is situated in a way to really appreciate that view, so we are glad to have it back. The biggest change is the positioning of the doorway. It used to be offset to one side of the room, but we have moved it to the middle of the room, which divides the space nicely inot two smaller rooms and makes the space more usable. On this side we have more a seating area, and on the other side is more of the kids’ area. 

Another really big change in this room is the lighting. It used to be really dark in this room, but the electricians installed 6 6-inch can fixtures in the ceiling, which really helped brighten this room a lot. We’ve also replaced the sconces from a single fixture to double fixtures. 

Thank you, as always, for joining. I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on the home renovation, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. And until next time, happy woodworking!