Bob: The long room is an interesting extra upstairs room northeast of the sewing room.
It obviously started out life as an attic, but previous owners had the idea of separating
the downstairs from the upstairs to make apartments, and consequently did major reconstruction
in this room. The ceiling is all newly insulated and sheetrocked, and rewired for a major number
of wall sockets and ceiling lights. Also, to the right, are the newer washer/dryer hookups. This
room is 25 feet long, and, even with the reduced ceiling (it's really only half a room,
with a left and right wall height of some 30 inches), it holds a lot of potential. Laundry,
storage, a spare bedroom, some great possibilities.
Bob: Those pockets on your left are, from left to right, 1) empty, 2) washer/dryer
hookups, and 3) a small closet for the upstairs water heater (yup, TWO water heaters,
one up, one down). In the middle of the ceiling, you can see the only installed one of four
possible flourescent light fixtures. We'll have to find some matching ones to light this
room up nicely.
Bob: These are the baseboard mouldings down near the window end of the room. It's as
if the contractor walked in one day and told everybody to go home. These mouldings are
installed, and masked off to be painted, and then...nothing! Can I leverage 5+ year-old
masking tape? You bet!
Bob: The laundry space was nicely finished at some time in the past, but lacked baseboard
mouldings when we moved in. Fortunately, the local hardware store had cheap bundles of
baseboard moulding remnants that matched perfectly. Here are several, cut to size, awaiting
installation.
Bob: Those remnants filled the bill perfectly. Here, you see them installed. As far as I
could tell, there originally were baseboards in this space, but they were removed for some
unknown reason.
Bob: All the baseboards needed spackling, my new ones as well as the existing ones. That's over 77 feet of baseboard, and then there's primer and two coats of trim paint, and that doesn't include the two doorways and the window. I was dizzy after going around this room so many times.
Nan: You're dizzy anyway. :)
Bob: The water heater closet and door trim and door get trim paint, after primer.
Bob: Our original intention was to use this color scheme in at least four rooms: the
upstairs bathroom, the sewing room, the long room and the living room. This was the first
room to get the whole application, and after seeing it, we liked it, but decided to extend
it only to the sewing room, and to mitigate the wall color in the living room. The trim
color is the same throughout the house. Finally, finally, that old masking tape comes up!
This room looks really good. Now see what happened next...