Rusty's Blog

Wherein I roll several home improvement tales into one blog post.

Painting my office Tennessee Orange

When we first moved into our house earlier this year, I toyed with the idea of painting our kitchen Tennessee Orange. Fortunately, I ended up being preoccupied with other projects and never got around to it. I say fortunately because I have to admit it probably wouldn’t have looked all that great in the kitchen, with all the subdued earth tones in our curtains, carpet etc. in the living and dining room.

It does, however, look pretty bangin’ in my office:

You may recall I did some mock-ups in Photoshop of what various colors would look like in my office. I’m pretty impressed with how close I was to getting it right in my mock-up:

See, the University of Tennessee says Tennessee Orange is officially Pantone 151. As I found out, however, paint retailers don’t typically have the capability to match Pantone colors, which are used by printers. My mock-up was done to the Pantone shade. When I actually painted, I used the Glidden Tennessee Orange from its line of college colors. If you factor in lighting affecting how a color actually looks on the wall with the probably just-a-hair-off differences between the Glidden and Pantone color systems, that mock-up is pretty fucking good.

As I’ve stated before, I am a firm believer that a coat of primer is not an optional step when painting. Getting Tennessee Orange to look right in my office required three top coats here even with a gray primer. I could imagine it taking six or seven coats without the primer, which would have been more work than just doing the primer in the first place.

And if you’re curious, my hierarchy of paint quality out of what we’ve used goes: Sherwin Williams > Glidden (Home Depot) > Valspar (Lowes).

The Glidden dried so quickly that I had to paint one wall, remove the tape immediately, then move on to the next wall rather than waiting until I was done with my full coat to remove the tape like I did with the Valspar in the bedroom. Amber said she had a similar experience with the Sherwin Williams paint in her bathroom. It wasn’t quite so drastic with the outdoor Sherwin Williams paint we used to paint the shed. Really, the Glidden and Sherwin Williams are neck-and-neck. All three gave about the same visual quality, with the Sherwin Williams getting the nod by a nose because the Glidden gave me a slight scare after the first coat before turning out fine. Fumes from the Valspar lingered for much longer than they did with the other two and made Amber sick for a few days.

Installing a ceiling fan in the bedroom

As many home improvement projects tend to do, this one took a lot longer than it seemed like it should have. We bought the fan several months ago, and it sat in the bedroom, still in the box, while I worked on other things and procrastinated. I’d never installed a ceiling fan before, and really didn’t know how much work it would be. As it turns out, there’s not really a strict formula.

In our case, we had a light fixture in the bedroom that I at first thought might work to mount the fan from. But as I attached the mounting bracket it became clear it wouldn’t, as the holes in the bracket were just a little too close together. So that meant I had to go into the attic to remove the bracket, then mount a new one. Easy, right? Well, the old bracket apparently was mounted when there was no ceiling in place, because it was screwed into the bottom of the attic beams.

That meant I had to saw through the old bracket to remove it. That was as much not-fun as it sounds like it would be, particularly since the only tool that would fit in the space was a Dremel (God bless the Dremel). Since it’s heat stroke weather in the attic, I could only work for about ten minutes at a time before climbing back down for some cooler air. I ended up having to saw the old bracket in three places to get it out, which was a solid day-and-a-half of work due to the space, climate and tool limitations.

Mounting the new bracket was more complicated than it had to be, again due to space limitations. From there it was pretty standard, though the instructions that came with the fan were translated from another language and were terrible, especially the wiring diagrams, which are one of the most important parts. When I first fired it up, the fan worked but the light didn’t because the instructions made it look like you didn’t have to use the blue wire for a single switch. But, you did. It’s not too far off base to get images in your head of movie scenes where people who don’t know what they’re doing are trying to defuse bombs. I’d wired car stereos before, so this wasn’t totally foreign to me, but it was a little nerve-wracking until I turned the power back on and nothing blew up.

I like to do as much of my own home improvement stuff as I can, and I’m glad I installed this fan since it was a learning experience. However, I will be paying an electrician if we decide to install any more.

Battling bugs

We’ve seen two Palmetto Bugs/American Cockroaches in our house since we moved in. We keep a clean house and have pest control come out regularly, it’s just Georgia in the summer, so you’re going to see a few sometimes. They sneak in when you leave doors open, they get in your gutters and through the attic sometimes, or a million other ways. Seeing one of these does not necessarily mean you have an infestation. If you see smaller German Cockroaches, however, that is very bad news. Still, we decided early on we’re not going to fuck around with them.

First, we had nine inches of TAP Insulation installed in our attic. It’s a fiber insulation coated with boric acid, and it makes it nearly impossible for bugs to come in through the attic. We have a healthy population of daddy long legs spiders in our attic and crawl space, and we haven’t seen nearly as many in our house since installing the insulation.

Next, our front and back yard were landscaped with lots of pine straw. It looked okay, but the problem with pine straw is roaches like to hide in it. So a couple of weekends ago I spent about a day and a half ripping all the pine straw out of the front yard and replacing it in some places with mulch. Amber was a big help digging pine straw out of the bushes too, though she can’t do yard work for too long before she starts to feel sick. She feels guilty about this, and I always reassure her it’s okay because I like doing work outside.

Finally, the double-paned window in my office had a broken seal. I’ve seen June Bugs get in-between the panes before and suspected it was possible for them to get in through there. Now they can’t, as we had it fixed last week.

We also had our gutters cleaned again. Roaches and other bugs love the sludge that builds up in gutters.

To do:

• Dig out all the pine straw under our deck and in the back yard
• Get wood mulch in front yard replaced with rubber mulch when we have landscaping done in the fall. Pine straw attracts roaches, wood mulch attracts termites. Not very good choices, but we’ll take the wood mulch in the short term.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 11:43 am. It was tagged american coackroaches, american cockroach, ceiling fan, ceiling fans, cockroach, cockroaches, dremel, dremels, german cockroach, german cockroaches, glidden, glidden paint, home depot lowes, home improvement, house, omnibus, our new house, paint, painting, pest control, roach, roaches, sherwin williams, sherwin williams paint, tap insulation, Tennessee Orange, valspar, valspar paint, yardwork. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.