Pandemic Pandemonium

Wow. It's been five years. A lot has happened. I've gotten married. I changed careers. I had back surgery. It would seem that Handy Mandy went into hibernation for a while. Ever since I started my new business it seems like I haven't had a moment to work on my house. And the 1965 Wellington Palace has needed some help. But when you own a business, particularly one that operates primarily on the weekend, well, there isn't a lot of time to straighten out a 55 year old fixer upper.

But then the world turned upside down.

We closed our business on March 16th, 2020, because I got Covid 19. And we haven't reopened due to state mandates, and, obviously, for the health and safety of our customers. Thankfully, I seem to have been the lucky recipient of a milder form of the disease, and have recovered. It was still not very fun. 1/10, definitely would not recommend.

And when I recovered I went a little bit stir crazy. And well, Handy Mandy came out of hibernation.

Our living room had original 1965 faux wood paneling everywhere. And I kind of randomly started tearing out walls. I know what a lot of you are thinking. "Man I'm glad I'm not married to that crazy woman." I'm betting at least once my husband wished he wasn't either.

Most of the walls had drywall behind the paneling but I think when they were doing the house they kind of... ran out of drywall. And instead of getting more, they just did this one wall of crazy patches, and then left the garage wall without any.

Bonus points if you can tell what movie I watched while I tore out walls. 

There was also some neat water damage in the laundry wall where the washer used to leak. The washer got fixed, but the lovely mold was left behind, since it was hidden behind paneling. So we ripped all of that out and went to studs.

Now here, I cheated. I was still pretty weak from Covid and not in the mood to hang full sheets of drywall. So I called my contractor. He rocked out an awesome job hanging up the drywall for me in one morning. I finished up the taping and bedding. 

And then I sanded. And mudded. And sanded. And mudded. I wanted smooth walls without a texture on them. I don't like orange peel. And what I really should have done was put a skim coat over the whole wall. 

But I didn't. 

If I'm being honest I did a pretty crappy job of taping and bedding, even though I did 3 coats. I could have done a lot better job. But at one point I was just over it. I wanted to paint and move on with my life. And I more or less decided that most people wouldn't notice my crappy job, and I was going to hang artwork on the walls anyway. And I went with it. 

Ages ago I ripped the paneling off the little wall by the kitchen to see what was underneath, and how hard it would be to redo the walls, and I painted it a nice neutral gray green, that I'm pretty sure I mixed myself from other buckets of used paint. I've discovered as I've matured that if you paint the walls a neutral color you can put wacky colors on your furniture without making people's heads spin. It's my new M.O. So I went to home depot and brought home every single color swatch they had and managed to find one that was actually almost a dead on match. 

It's a bit lighter than the original, but with the fire place being where it is, between this wall and any other wall, you can't visually tell the difference. So we painted. 

I tend to do the cutting in and Husband is very handy with a roller. When we start at the same time, we generally finish within 20 minutes or so of one another. 

Sometimes I leave him a little note to cover up.


Since we had moved all the furniture and taken off all the switch plates and outlet covers, we decided this would be a good time to rewire everything with nice white outlets and switches. This is a pretty cheap swap if you can do it yourself. I think we spent less than $20 for five switches and four outlets. This is what passes for quality time in our house. Also, headlamps are super convenient, especially when all your breakers are turned off. I think we'll start a new fashion.

Next we replaced all our crown molding. We paid a bit extra to get stainable pine crown molding and I managed to match the stain on our kitchen cabinets exactly. I figured, I had done a 3000 square foot business in baseboards, crown molding couldn't be that much more difficult. Nothing a couple of youtube videos couldn't sort out.

Let me tell you something. Crown molding is hard. Much harder than baseboards. Way harder. There were some expletives. There was a lot more "Amanda cut this wrong so we have to do it again." We removed at least four pieces of trim to try to get them to fit in better. And there was just enough waste that I had to go buy an extra piece because I ran out. Which meant two coats of stain and one of poly, and waiting overnight for it to dry before I could even attempt to cut it.

There were tears.

But you know what? I'm thinking of adding crown to the dining room. So it couldn't have been that bad right?

Anyway it looks great. And I had enough left over to make this nifty coat rack.

And I got a bit coat rack crazy. I found this gorgeous piece of scrap wood in my pile in the garage, and after a bit of sanding, I slapped a nice edge on it with my router. 

Someone had painted that. Who does that? What is wrong with people? Anyway. It made a great coat rack for the back door.