I give up...

Now that the wonderful festivities of St. Patrick are over, I can now get back to working on the house. Last weekend was the traditional road race and parade in Holyoke. I had attended the road race as a spectator of course. Here are a couple of pictures from the road race.

After getting my head on straight from last weekend, I decided to begin this weekend by continuing the kitchen remodel. Over the week, I had decided to try to remove the paint from the tin ceiling. Thus I purchase a heat gun and most importantly a Lead paint test kit. Since I have some areas of the house that have Lead paint, I wanted to be extremely cautious. Lead paint when heated, releases a toxic gas that can be extremely dangerous to the human body. After conducting the test it turns out that ceiling was painted with something other than Lead paint. I have to admit that was a relief.

The process wasn’t as easy as I had initially thought. When using the heat gun, the moisture under the paint would evaporate and become trapped under the covering layer of the paint, which would cause it to bubble up. Once bubbled, I would use a scrapper to remove the paint. Here is what the surface would look like after scrapping the surface.

However, because of the texture embossed in the tin ceiling, it was extremely difficult to remove all of the paint. I then tried to use paint remover solution and a metal wired brush. This process was also difficult. After about 2 hours of repeating the process, here are the result.

One tile after 2 hours… So I decided that it was time to stop this process all together and just re-paint the ceiling. To finish the entire surface it would be extremely time consuming. I have to remember that this is just a rental property and I should not spend too much time on things like this. So with that said, I decided to change course and finish the crown molding.

Here are a couple of pictures of the crown molding thus far.

There is still a lot of work required to finish the kitchen, but it is slowly coming together… Well until next time, happy building.

Combat Roll...

So when you are using a pneumatic nail gun, always remember that the nail needs something behind the piece of wood that you are nailing. If not, you have a projectile bouncing off the walls and you hit the ground like a fool. Ok, I’ll explain more about that later…

Next on the list of things to do was install some type of covering for the opening above the refrigerator.

I decided to install a box that covers the area. More like an “L” shape covering. Here are a couple of pictures showing my progress of the new box cover.

After installing the cover, I began to install the crown molding. Part of the problem was that I had to increase the distance for the crown molding. The reason for the required increase in distance was because of the tin damage around the edges. I wanted to cover up the issues. So I added a .25 inch decorative shim to both the wall and ceiling. Ok this is where crazy begins… I needed to create a fixture piece so that I could determine where to put the shims on the wall. So the sample piece was a little interesting, I first clamped the pieced together and then nailed them together. When I nailed the first piece together, I didn’t hit both pieces together, the nail shoot across the room and I did a perfect combat roll on the floor as if I was back in basic training.

After realizing my mistake, I decided to give it a try again… Yup I missed it again and the shot hit the martini mixer and hit the wall. This time I decided to use the old hammer and nail…That worked out much better, but it was much harder than I had original thought. So I cheated and use the pneumatic air gun to finish the job. It actually worked much better.

I used the fixture to help locate the shims. By using the fixture I drew lines on the ceiling. Once the lines were in place, I began to cut the shims and nail them in place. But I first decide to try to figure out the miter cuts for the crown molding… HOLY CRAP was that a mission... I decided to do some research online. Which was helpful; however for some reason my mind and cutting techniques were not in sink. I spent about an hour and half trying to cut an inside and outside corner… The angles and orientation was not sinking in. I finally wrote my plan out on paper and that finally helped. But once I got the hang of cutting the crown molding, it was getting late. So I began to cut the decorative shims and nail them in place.

But because of the time, I decided to postpone the additional work until later...There is certainly more to follow, but until next time, happy building…