Posted by Doug
Wed, 26 Feb 2003 15:45:00 GMT
I’ve had 14 different addresses in my life. Not counting various apartments at various times, my wife and I have owned four houses in the (almost) 11 years we’ve been married. Based on all this moving, house buying, and house selling experience I can offer up this truism: A house is never so lovely as it is just before you sell it. In pursuit of this statement, Carla and I have made a long list of things we should have been doing all along but never found enough time, energy, or money to get done.
One of my jobs (that I finished on Monday) was caulking. I’m really bad at it. The art of caulking consists of two primary skills. First, you must be able to put down an appropriate sized bead of steady thikness. My beads are more like a series of big globby dots connected by a thin string of silicone. Second, you must be able to take your finger (wet I’m told) and gently smooth out the bead leaving a nice clean line. I always end up just wiping my bead off and having to redo the whole thing. Ta da! I found a new gadget at Lowe’s. It basically makes the finger skill unnecessary. So this time I have lots of nice, clean, caulking seals!
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Posted by Doug
Wed, 26 Feb 2003 15:25:00 GMT
So we’re trying to get the house ready to sell. When we bought the house we were given a “Touch Up Kit” that included the paints needed. Unfortunately when I went to get the wall paint can was terribly ruined. Classic case of failure to clean up properly. The result was two things. First, after Carla had done touch up painting for most of the dinning room we realized it was drying darker than the rest of the wall. That means our dinning room was roughly poka-dotted. The lid had not been secured properly and it was all rusted inside. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that the paint wouldn’t be the same color. The second problem was that the can had so much paint and rust on the outside we couldn’t tell
exactly what kind of paint it was. We were able to tell that it was Sherman William’s flat “City Loft”, but not the grade. While I was at the Sherman William’s store the guy there was able to look up and see that recently our builder had bought of flat paint of grade X. I pay $25 for a gallon of “City Loft” flat in grade X, come home, and re-touch all the spots where Carla had touched earlier. It looks great! What a match! So, we proceed to finish touching up all the walls downstairs. After we finished, we watched a movie. After the movie we went to inspect our handy work. It becomes obvious to me that grade X was the wrong grade. We should have gotten grade Y. When you look at the walls dead on, it looks fine. The color is right. When you look at the walls from an angle, you can clearly see the difference between where we painted and where we didn’t.
I’m not exactly sure how to fix this. The painting is certainly less than optimal. I feel like the “right thing to do” would be to take this new paint and paint all of the walls downstairs; just take a roller and put a single coat of paint on everything. Of course, that’s a lot of work and definitely more than one gallon of paint. The flip side is that whoever buys the house will probably paint over it anyway. Since it probably looks good enough to show, maybe we should just leave it to them to paint it with the colors they want. I can see where this is going. It looks like I have a lot of painting left to do this week.
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