Trim Test

After spending most of the past two weeks replacing inefficient aluminum windows and doing a lot of shuffling and reorganizing of materials to make space, today I shifted focus indoors to start getting a sense of what things might look like when we finally get around to finishes. Because so much of what we're doing at this stage is basic structural improvement, we've been resigned to living with the shoddy unfinished drywall look of a remodel that was abandoned midstream.

But because we have guests coming, we thought it would be nice to tidy up the west-facing sitting room that's adjacent to the kitchen. The dangling cutout to the left of the heater was particularly irksome both as eyesore and source of drafts, so I started the day by taping and mudding it as well as the seams and corners of that wall (but not along the ceiling as that will be vaulted later). I also finally got around to cleaning up the rough edge from when I tore up the waterdamaged linoleum floor. I used an oscillating saw for a nice straight line flush with the wall.

In the course of cleaning out and reorganizing the garage, I found some of the original CVG (clear vertical grain) fir boards that were the house's original trim. Some of it was slightly water damaged from the burst pipes that originally wrecked this place, but a quick pass with 60 grit orbital sander effaced most of the watermarks. Some dark spots around nail holes remained but that's not a dealbreaker as our aesthetic allows for some rustic touches.

It was a fair day for setting up workstation outside, where a neighbor we hadn't met yet introduced himself in passing. Glenn is a retired physician who said we could come to him with any medical issues we might face, as well as use the hiking trails he's cut around his property up the hill. Now that's neighborly! Speaking of which, my work was interrupted when our next door neighbor's carport canopy blew over in a freak wind gust, so we dropped what we were doing to help him right it. Neighbors helping neighbors is a beautiful thing.

We're not yet settled on what the ultimate window trim treatment will be, so I left the horizontal pieces long to allow for future trimming. But even though this is obviously a little janky looking, it's still a vast improvement over the hack drywall job and a promising glimpse of what will be...