Bathroom Prep

Hey look!  It’s progress!

Besides patching the giant fracking hole in the wall there were a few other areas that needed some TLC before we could paint.  The most noticeable of these was chunk of window trim that someone cut out to fit in that nasty old light fixture.

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We’ve acquired a number of random wood scraps from other projects and luckily the 1×2’s were the perfect depth for the trim.  Unfortunately they were just a hair too wide… and the only power saw we have is a miter saw.  No sane person is going to put their fingers that close to the blade to shave a 1/4″ off of a 1×2. I could have picked up a hand saw, but it would still be difficult to safely hold a piece of wood that narrow while cutting.  Instead I screwed a few pieces of wood together to lengthen the piece I needed to cut and keep my fingers well away from the blade.

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The wood got cut and I still have all my fingers.  Win.  It’s a little too small, but I can hide a gap a lot more easily than I can hide a too-wide piece of wood.

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Then I picked up a couple little strips of craft wood to mimic the raised edge detail on the out edge of the trim.  It was a little too high so I used my palm sander to knock it down a bit.

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After that it was a just a matter of evening everything out with wood filler.

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The only thing left to do now is paint it since there’s no way you can stain over this patch job and have it look good.  Luckily I wanted white trim anyway.

There was more work still to be done on the window frame though.  When we moved it we ripped out some glass shelves that were built in across the window. This left some glue residue behind and exposed some foam insulation along the window frame.  Not so great to paint over.

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I started by sanding off the glue residue.  Next I cut down some quarter round to hide the exposed insulation. Based on the other windows in the house there should be a larger piece of trim here (that would actually cover all the damaged wood) but I didn’t think I could find something that would work without a lot of custom cuts and routing and I just don’t currently have the equipment for that.

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We pulled off the closet door earlier too, opting for a curtain instead (the cat box is in the closet so it needs to be very easily accessible).  Unfortunately the hinges were glued in place so we had more glue residue to contend with.  I scraped and sanded the glue off, but left the holes.  The curtain should hide them well enough and if we (or future owners) decide to swap the door back in it will be way easier.

I also ripped out the old shelves in the closet since they’re rather haphazard.  The closet’s getting painted too and I’ll be putting up new shelving so it looks more organized.  I’ve also added the person who installed these shelves and painted over the screws eleventy-billion time to the People I Want to Punch list.  There’s a fair amount of peeling paint I’ll need to scrap off the walls too. Urgh.

Everything else was just a matter of patching the normal holes, cracks, and gaps that you encounter when painting.

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