The tapers are coming! The tapers are here!

Here they are! I’ve basically handed my house over to them for the week. The house, 10 buckets of joint compound, and 6 rolls of paper tape.

And how did we get here? Another week of little odds and ends. Patching holes in old plaster and defects in new drywall with 20 minute setting compound. Yanking screws and nails that didn’t grab properly and drilling ones that did farther in.

Fully clearing the house means that my grandmother’s red armoire is in the back yard.

I sent out the two nastiest radiators to be sandblasted and primed white.

And the mattresses are bagged and in the basement. Except this one box spring that wouldn’t fit down the stairs. Also, I finally found that recessed light that I drywalled over almost a year ago.

There are still lots of radiators in the house, and not much of anything else. A little good news – all that foam insulation is paying off in a big way. These plug-in electric radiators turned my house into an Easy Bake oven!

And since the small bit of original plaster got a lot of attention recently, let’s see what it looks like now.

So… what are the next steps? I’m ready to paint. Drywall primer on every wall and ceiling in the house. But before using nice finish paint I have to hit my radiators and some furniture that belongs to my parents with a sprayer. If you want anything painted, bring it over. I’ll make it any color you want as long as it’s white.

So I’m not quite ready to paint the house yet. The exception is the bathroom. To gain access to finish the walls, we took out a few things that I want back. In the meantime I’ll be re-opening the pee hole.

But before I do anything else, I’m just going to enjoy being a stranger in my own home for a week. I’ll rest, catch up on laundry, sort through the embarrassing junk pile in my car, and go do fun things. And later this week we can talk… in excruciating detail… about paint.