The Utility Room Project - Part 3

Don’t you just love it when things work out the way you want them to? I certainly do. So what in the world is the deal with this utility room of ours?!

Yesterday I spent some nine hours painting. Yes, painting a roughly 64 square foot room took that long. There was one setback after another; it is obvious to me, and has been for years, that this type of work is not my forte.

First of all my brilliant idea of sealing the ceiling with primer was not completely successful. The primer caused the old paint to peel off too. Hopefully after it is cured in a day or two this problem will be handled.

Then I moved on to painting the walls, which did go smoothly but took all stinking day. You see, this is the utility room, which has water pipes, a hot water heater, and a furnace permanently attached. The washer and dryer I could move around as needed. There is also a coat and storage closet that we decide to paint on the inside as well.

You don’t realize how much stuff ends up in a closet until you have to take it all out for some reason. I managed to cover the entire bathroom floor with the contents of that closet, and the coats were all on the bed!

Back to the painting, the paint went on okay as I said before, but it was thinner than I was expecting so it required two coats. That was no biggie, but painting behind the furnace and water heat proved to be very difficult.

We moved into this house about fifteen years ago, the walls in every room were Sears brand Antique White. We have redone every room since then, except the utility room. We repainted it once, but we used the same color it had been so that we didn’t have to go behind the furnace and water heater. Keri wanted the room to be persimmon this time, which is a pinkish orange color that makes the room look really nice. It was worth the time I spent straining to get behind everything.

Then I moved onto the baseboards. There were a couple of setbacks here as well, but the most frustrating part was the length of the pieces. I had asked Keri to pick up eight foot long baseboards, four of them. The guy at Lowes lied to her and told her that’s what they were, but they were rally only seven feet long each. So I started out four feet short.

This was alright, I actually only needed a couple feet off the forth one, however this made my margin for error very tight as I had very little excess to work with now. All of my pieces are cut and fitted now, but I cannot nail them to the walls.

The utility room is the one room in the house that does not have ¾ inch drywall. It has ½ inch drywall with a ¼ inch of sheetrock. You can’t nail through this stuff, nor can you drive screws through it. You have to drill a pilot hole, and then drive your screws. Screws don’t work for baseboards because the heads are too large too cover up.

This means I need some adhesive like Gorilla Glue. I’ll be picking some yup later today. I also am going to get the cabinets up today. I will at least get them started; I need to re-hang one of the doors and I need to put the handles on them before I hang them. There are a couple of minor details to do to the room also, but I should have it finished soon.