clean corners, messy schedules

Have I mentioned that fall is a busy time for us? The boy is in two park district classes on-top of getting the kids to swim class each week. I’m taking a class AND teaching a class, on-top of working the normal full-time schedule…getting sick kind of throws a wrench into all of that. At least it didn’t happen while the wife was at her office’s yearly convention (I don’t know how I’m going to make it through that week on my own). So I haven’t had the time I would like to have had to keep working on things around the house. Throw in a couple of visitors and typical fall events and that time shrinks even more. 

Not that I can complain about having apples to make apple cake with. Let’s clear that up right now; apple cake is not the issue. However, I will complain about having to sit in on an 8 PM class at work tonite, even if it means I could go in a little later than usual to make up for it. So I snuck some time to work on something before going to actual work today. 

The fireplace has become a project I wish I had known what to do with while I was initially messing with the basement. It would have been a lot easier to do this additional taping and mudding with everything else, but oh well. At least I figured things out at some point. I took a fever-addled pass at smoothing out the mud and priming everything last weekend so this morning all I wanted to do was get a coat of paint on. This will likely all get covered in tile eventually anyway, but paint will give it something else to adhere to other than paper so it’s worth the effort. 

Mudded and primed, all with a tiny tiny brush.

A quick piece of advice: don’t take a two month break in-between painting projects and just assume you have a clean roller around you can use. Then you’ll have to go to the store while you’re sick, forget to get a new roller, and end up painting something with just your 1.5 inch short brush b/c it’s the only one clean and you can’t be bothered to get anything else. Sigh.

So much nicer.

My favorite part of this has been getting a good transition from the wall to the fireplace in this corner. Taking the paneling down made a bad transition from brick to wood even worse, with painted/unpainted brick and some bad caulk that I didn’t know what to do with, so I covered it in molding until I had a plan for the entire fireplace. Smoothing out some of the earlier mud has been icing on the cake, so to speak. And now we have what’s basically a blank slate to work with.

Still drying, but not looking terrible.

Part of me wants to go big and just tile the whole thing shiny black but I don’t think the wife would go for that. It might be hard to match a mantel to as well, which I think is going to be a whole other challenge. For now the matching paint will do until we get the tiles. I actually don’t think it looks terrible, which is good b/c it’s looking like at least a month before I get some time together to take next steps. Just one more reason to look forward to the holidays and time off.