Steve I'm taking notes these are all great tips!

Steve, this is all super, super helpful! I also had missed your postbout dog smell, thanks!
I’m writing everything down in my house book!!

piqué, I am super torn about the wall color! We have white in our current living room and I love it, but the floor is much lighter, so it’s hard to say whether that’s a big part of it. Also we get warmth from our furniture so that will still be there...

Mr. SK seems pretty positive towards white-ish creams, we’ll see!

Breaking my promise, but you absolutely need to see if the existing paint is oil base or latex. There are lots of instructions on the net that tell how to do the test. It’s easy.

Test the walls and trim in each room. If they’re oil you are going to have to prime first and you’ll need oil base primer. If you try to paint with latex over old oil based paint about half of it will peel off in sheets in a week and the other half will require dynamite to remove it.

Chances are you are dealing with latex as the colors look pretty contemporary. Even so, it will pay to test first.

They left their paint cans, so I’m pretty sure those are what they used, but we’ll check just in case.

Thank you!!

The color on those walls looks quite similar to what we have in our house.

Not sure, but it looks like the previous owners may have used something other than flat paint on the ceiling. Might be the reflected light from the window, but I think I see a sheen.

Adding my 2c regarding paint....

In the good old days when we used to tackle painting ourselves, we would just use the same paint (both finish/sheen and color) because it was easy; no cutting in different paints in corners. What can I say? We were rookies.

When we hired a professional painter, he recommended two things. First, if you aren't doing white/off-white and are instead going with a version of the wall color, use a lighter version of the wall paint on the ceiling. Ceilings get less light which makes the ceiling color look much darker. Cutting the wall color with white gives a nice result.

The second thing he said to do is to use flat paint on the ceiling. Flat paint hides flaws and roller marks much better than anything with a sheen. The downside is that it is not very forgiving when it comes to being cleaned, but on the ceiling it doesn't matter. It does tolerate touchups well if necessary, like when your Newfoundland lobs a slobber grenade up there.

There are a lot more choices with respect to finishes and grades of paint than there used to be. And today's low sheen finishes are more washable than they were in the past.

FWIW, in our house we use flat on ceilings, matte for walls in living, dining, and bedrooms, and eggshell for hallways, kitchen, and baths. Trim is done in a low lustre/satin enamel.

Two professional painters that I've worked with give top marks to Sherwin-Williams for flat on the ceiling and Benjamin Moore on walls. Moore started in these parts and still has a loyal following decades later. There are a lot of other good paints these days that are more cost effective than Moore, so I'm not necessarily recommending them, just mentioning what the pros here like.

WTG thanks for those comments. I need to look at the ceilings again. They are white for sure, but I don't know what kind of paint is on there.

I really don't want to have to paint the ceilings if we can avoid it. As we go through the house, there's so much that needs to be done. I was thinking we would just paint "the walls" but we are going to need to do a lot to the trim in most of the rooms I think.

And the previous owners never opened their windows, and had so many window treatments on each window that I wonder if someone in the family had either some kind of illness, or problems with migraines or something. Some of the windows had pull blinds (the kind that snap up when you pull on them), Venetian blinds, a paper accordion blind and then curtains on top. That's not an exaggeration, four layers of window treatments. And the paper blinds were taped at the top!

So anyway, they never opened the windows, and many had been painted shut. Well, the inspector flagged that of course, so the owners went through and made sure all the windows opened. Well, because they had so many damn window treatments, we didn't really get a good look at the window frames, but some of them have damaged paint from being made to open-able. So that's another thing we have to figure out.

Sigh.

quote:

Originally posted by ShiroKuro:
Quirt, thanks!

What about vinegar and baking soda wipe-downs? I was going to try thst first, l look for Nautre’s Miracle too!

Nature's Miracle has a whole bunch of products. The urine odor eliminator was our go-to when we first got dogs more than 30 years ago. Still good but there are lots more choices these days.

Steve had a lot of good advice. Locating the smell is key. There could be lingering odors on stuff like blinds or floors that will go away once you wipe them down. Same for the walls; fresh paint will change that.

If you mix baking soda and vinegar together it fizzes like crazy. Great for clearing out a slighly clogged drain. Not sure what you were thinking about using it on.

pique uses Odormute. It has enzymes to neutralize the stinky stuff. You mix the Odormute powder with water. It has to contact and stay on the source of the odor, so it's not suitable for things that shouldn't stay wet (like wood floors). I've found it to be effective on carpeting when used in a carpet cleaning machine.

I've also used something called Atmosklear that works fairly well to remove odors, but it did fade an area of nylon carpet where I applied a lot of it. Lesson learned. It's also not easy to find and isn't cheap; Menards has it around here but otherwise you have to get it online.

Check labels and/or MSDS for any product and see what's in it before picking one. As they say, try the product out on an inconspicuous area to see what happens.

I'd put ceiling painting at the bottom of your long list of to-dos. If you're OK with the color and there are no stains or holes, no one will notice the ceilings. They will notice walls, trim, etc.

There are a lot of relatively inexpensive cosmetic things you can do, and a lot of expensive ones. The biggest change in a house, imo, is switching flooring ($$$) and painting ($). But I'd also recommend a jillion times over that you do these types of jobs before you move in, if you can swing it at all. It is so much easier to paint, stain, fix trim, etc., in a vacant house.

Otherwise, you run the risk of never actually getting it started and/or finished. Or so I've heard. From friends.

quote:

The biggest change in a house, imo, is switching flooring ($$$) and painting ($).

Those are the main things we need to do. Well, only one room needs flooring (the room with the world's ugliest carpet), and I think we're going to do a vinyl plank or something similar, inexpensive but hopefully not ugly.

It's the painting that is going to kill. And not really monetarily (I don't think!) but just in terms of time and acquiring know-how.

I think we'll be able to get all the painting done before we move in. But it's going to be stressful, at best!

There are some great looking vinyl plank flooring out there (is?). Is "flooring" a mass noun?

I wish we had it in our current house. It looks just like the real thing, but upkeep is nothing.

If you have a hole that is big enough to put your finger in -- or bigger -- it will be a pain in da butt to just try to fill the hole with spackle. Try this instead:

Get some cardstock like 3x5 index cards, or some junk mail or something fairly stiff but easy to fold. Use uncoated paper -- not the shiny stuff. Cut a piece that is twice the size of the hole or so that extends an inch beyond the edge of the hole in each direction.

Fold the piece of paper like the first folds of an origami crane... that is two perpendicular mountain folds and two perpendicular valley folds that are diagonal to the mountains... anyway, fold it such that you can poke it through the hole.

Get a needle and some thread. Poke a thread through the middle of the paper, then back to the front side with a little space between the needle holes so you have both loose ends of the thread on the same side. Give yourself a good long bit thread so you can hang onto the thread while you poke the paper through the hole.

Slather a generous glob of spackle on the same side of the paper the loose ends of the thread are on. Fold the paper back into the shape above with the spackle on the inside. Hang onto the threads and poke the paper into the hole. Pull the threads gently so the paper unfolds with the spackle now holding the paper onto the backside of the wallboard. If it's a very large hole, you might tape the thread to the wall to keep the paper from sliding off.

Let it dry for several hours or overnight.

Snip off the threads below the surface of the wall.

You can now spackle the hole and the spackle doesn't just push through the hole and drip down the other side.


We were painting the back bedroom last fall. A couple years earlier, we'd had TV cable run into that room -- the cable ran around the outside of the house. When the installer was done, there was a plate with the coax cable connector on the wall, and a few inches away, there was another little box with a phone jack. I asked what the phone jack was for and the installer just said something like, "oh, we just install one of those as part of the wiring."

So, we no longer have cable and getting ready to paint the room. I took the cover off the phone jack and it didn't look like it was actually connected to anything. I pried it off the wall -- it was stuck on with that double-stick foam tape (I hate that stuff). Behind it was a thumb-sized hole in the wallboard. No wire, no nothing. Just a crude hole punched in the wall.

Hmmmm... methinks mister cable guy missed the mark by a couple inches when trying to line up the inside and outside holes and instead of fessing up, he just stuck this phone jack over the hole to hide it.

So, I got me an index card, a foot of thread, and some spackle...

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:
I'd put ceiling painting at the bottom of your long list of to-dos. If you're OK with the color and there are no stains or holes, no one will notice the ceilings.

Just make sure you are really really really happy with the condition and color of the ceilings before you waive painting them. Painting is so much easier when the room is empty. Obviously, painting walls means you have to move all of the furniture away from them, but painting a ceiling means you might get spatter on anything in the room.

When we did that back bedroom, we got a can of something called 'extremely blindingly white ceiling paint' or something like that. It is actually PINK when it comes out of the can, but dries white. It is great stuff... except... if you get any on the walls, it shows through a bit orangey through the wall paint. And we had painted down the wall an inch or so when we edged the whole ceiling. I would not use that paint again. We had to go over the top edge of the wall about five times to hide the orange bleed-through.

I've painted. My ceilings are NOT white!

I chose a lichen green. Light. My woodwork is also lichen green.

I think ceilings first while the room is empty. Easy Peary with rollers. Hardest is cutting the edge. Still easy on a ladder.

One room two days, two people. Love the new paints. Good coverage.

Enjoy!

Oh, and listen to Steve about the paper for covering stuff. I just put down some old bedsheets. The big drips of paint went right through.

I don't know if they are available where you are, but I can usually find painters standing in front of paint stores looking for work. Some of them have been very good and all of them are better at it than I am.