Thursday, April 11, 2019

Suck it Maria... Again

Well, a month has gone by and where have I been?  Busy!  That's where!  My dining room renovation has been coming along nicely albeit a bit slowly.  I'm about to measure the room for wainscoting, but at least the tin ceiling is finally up.  Before:






Somewhere at the start: 






Finished:




Eventually she'll be painted to match my other original ceilings, but I was pretty impressed with how it turned out.  It was an expensive upgrade and I had to save my pennies for a year in order to afford it, but it was well worth the money to match up with what I already had!


Any project Jared and I work on follows the same basic routine and the tin ceiling was no exception.  The job starts innocently enough, but eventually, I become rather abusive about Jared's inability to measure anything correctly the first go round.  Sometimes we even have to start completely over.  At some point I spend time feeling angry and worried about the money that I've spent to fix something Jared can't get right.  Then when I sink into a passive aggressive and grouchy despair, Jared usually drops the F bomb, feels horrible immediately and begins to apologize profusely.  My poor patient husband never complains, corrects, or seems fazed by my ridiculous nitpicking behavior and when I have pushed him to his penitent stage, I remember what a horrible shrew I am and half heartedly try to be less grouchy and bossy.  When we both calm down, Jared is finally able to get his measurements right, the job proceeds, and then I suddenly become ecstatic when the job looks as beautiful as I had hoped it would...  I know...  Jared should dump me because I'm pathetic...


Even though we sometimes disagree about how to proceed with a job, one thing we have been completely united about for the last 2 years has been our disgust over the horrible workmanship/disrepair our home was subjected to by the previous owners.  That's right people!  It's my favorite scapegoat...  MARIA!  What's the latest crime you might wonder?  Well, this...






I forgot to take a true "before" picture but you can at least maybe get an idea of what I was dealing with.  As we were putting up the tin in the dining room, I noticed that the ceiling outside of my bedroom was also tin and had a funny little hole in the corner.  I figured since I was already in the mess, I may as well try to see if it needed any modifications.  I knew the hole had to be left over from the conversion of radiator heat to my current baseboard heaters.  Knowing Maria's M.O. I theorized that the hole was probably just plastered over, rather than repaired with the proper tin materials.  As I poked around, I found out that not only was the hole from the old radiator pipe fixed with a piece of cardboard and then plastered over, but the original wooden crown molding was so damaged, they had used foam spray to cobble it together.  When I removed the "repair," I could see directly up into my attic and all the way to the roof.  Fantastic.  I tried to find a shop that could replicate the damaged pieces, but it was going to be several hundred dollars for about 12 inches of custom milled wood.  Although I like to preserve as much of the original furnishings in my home projects as possible, sometimes several hundred dollars could be better spent on other battles.  So, after conferring with my mom (who couldn't figure it out because she wasn't with me), I eventually just ripped all the old crown molding out, fixed the gaping hole with sheetrock, then pounded up a new tin ceiling and crown molding.  Check it out!




Amazing what a thorough job - instead of a half baked, idiotic job - can do!  By the time we finished outside the bedroom door, we were pretty fast at this tin ceiling installation thing and now we nearly have the front entry way done too:




We have to order a few more pieces of crown molding and flat trim because of the extra job outside my room that I didn't count on...  And because Jared can't measure worth a darn...  But all told, I decided not to hassle him too much since it all looks so darn good!  Plus, I'm worried he might actually figure out what a fat jerk I am and dump me, so I'm trying to be on my best behavior for a few weeks.  Actually, now that I think about it, we're hoping to get the wainscoting supplies sometime next week.  If he decides to come to his senses and dumps me, I'm going to remind him he gets the kids in the divorce...  I'm keeping the house though.  I've nagged him to the bone for it...









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