Painting and such

Spent some time painting last night. We’re still doing the primer. Jenn painted most of the upstairs hallway while I spent time on the sitting room. We’ve been doing a lot of ‘cheating’ in that we are only painting areas that don’t require masking. We’re going to have to start masking if we want to keep going. We need to mask off the windows, the tub and shower enclosures, and exposed beams. That will be a lot of work. It is also taking more paint than I had thought. We bought a 5 gallon can of the primer, but it’s going fast. There appears to be only a little over a half a can left while we have painting less than a quarter of the upstairs. Ugh. And at $83 for 5 gallons, it isn’t cheap. At this rate, we’re going to end up spending at least $500 just on paint.
I spent some time last night drawing pictures of built-in ‘sideboards’ for the dining room. This built-in is intended to do a lot. I hope it will hold most of our dinnerware, be a display case for Jenn’s china and other nice things, and also be a lockable liquor cabinet. In addition, I thought a counter top would be nice, with a mirror as a ‘backsplash’ of sorts. I paged through the ‘Bungalow Nation’ book for some good examples. The design I came up with is simple, but has the potential to achieve all of the above goals. It has 4 glass cabinet doors above the countertop, 2 more cabinet doors below, and a set of 3 drawers below as well. One design problem for the area is that the left half is deeper (32”) than the right half (18”). This is because the left side was originally a bedroom closet and the right side is space borrowed from (and shared with) the bathroom. Finally, I might like to make the glass doors and mirror into a tiffany-style leaded glass project. The pattern would have to be fairly simple, but it could look really great.