Making progress!

I think this selfie says it all…

We are thrilled with the dining room ceiling – AND the fact that it is done!  This has definitely been Eric’s project.  He ripped out the sheet rock and pulled out all the nails.

Then he sanded, primed and painted this beautiful ceiling.

After hours on the ladder, we got this beauty!

It’s too bad this pic does not do it justice.

Working from the ceiling down, we started on the trim next.  Big shout out to Friday Lumber Co. where we got our stack of one-bys. We primed and painted these, too.  We were thankful for a little painting help from friend and MBA alum, Teagen.

I’ve been looking forward to this part for awhile… I got to write Scripture on the backs of these boards. A house blessing, so to speak. It’s been my favorite part so far!

After the boards were painted, we caulked and nailed them up.

And so here’s a little section of the finished product!

These paints are all Sherwin-Williams.  Shell White on the ceiling, Drift of Mist on the walls, and Sticks &Stones on the trim.

 

Demo Days!

Spring Break at Casablanca is off to a great start! The last two days have been very productive. We have this fabulous new gear, see…

I can hardly see – the face mask fogs up my glasses which fogs up my safety glasses. No telling what mistakes I made with these on. We are working on the soon-to-be dining room, starting from the ceiling down. We had great hopes that there was 164-year-old heart pine shiplap under the popcorn ceiling and we hit pay dirt!

We were so excited. The sheet rock was put up in that ceiling with approximately one million nails, so it took Eric most of the time just to pull those out! But when it was all done, we got this wondertastic fabulousness…

Eric is now working on plugging all the nail holes. I can’t wait to share with you what this looks like when it is painted and sealed.  Meanwhile, this is what I was doing… stacking what Eric pulled down from the ceiling while it poured down rain.

On Demo Day #2, Eric and Fleet spent most of the afternoon repairing a broken water pipe… bless them.

But it’s done now and we have water again!

My Day 2 job was to master the plaster. When the trim was taken off in the dining room, a crowbar was used. Bless. So I had to fill in all the little dents in the wall. I made a mess to begin with, but I think I’m now a plaster expert.  (Yeah, right).

But this view, though!

More soon!

All the Layers…

Even though we still have mountains of paperwork to climb before Casablanca in Coaling is officially/legally/really ours, we just couldn’t help ourselves. Mavinee was down for the weekend, so we spent much of it at the Coaling house working on a small project – stripping paint off one of the doors.

Eric and Mavinee took all the hardware off first. We found a treasure – Bennington door knobs. I was lame and didn’t get a pic of these yet – they are ceramic marble looking knobs, definitely antique, definitely cool.

Uncovering the layers of paint on these solid wood doors was a hoot! I’m pretty sure we revealed every decade for the last millennia – there was cream, followed by sea foam green, followed by either blue or purple depending on the light, followed by grey.  Finally, we got to the wood.  We used Goof-Off, which should be more accurately named “Goop-On” – it was nasty, but effective. We painted on the goo, waited 15 minutes and then scraped and scraped.

Have I told y’all lately how awesome Mavinee is? Bless her heart, she worked so hard. During the times we waited on the Goo to bubble the paint, she weeded the yard. BLESS!

We had some visitors come over and check us out…

Meanwhile, this is what Lucy was doing at home, just in case you wanted to know…

Other than the cat pic, maybe you can indulge this Baptist Sunday School teacher in thinking that this whole experience was just one big life lesson. This door was covered in dirt, grime and layers of old paint. Just like our hearts were layered in sin before we knew God. If our lives, lived in sin, looked like this old door, covered in goo, it would be this:

Yuck.

But when we accept Jesus as our Savior, He starts peeling away the layers of sin to reveal a heart as it was intended – at peace with God, focused on serving Him, sure about our eternity.

Can you see that original wood under there? You know what’s better about how God strips away sin from our lives? In God’s eyes, it happens completely in an instant. He doesn’t need several weekends of work to make it happen. At the point of our salvation, God chooses to see us through the veil of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. It may take a lot longer to strip off those layers of sin from our lives in our daily experience, but in light of eternity, we are already clean.