It's a four-day weekend and I spent the last 2 days working on the first room: the kitchen. While I worked I watched/listened to some horror movies. It may be 105 outside, but it's still September and close enough for creepy things. I cued them up on my phone and had a lil tv in the house while I worked. I "watched": "You're Next", "Alien", "The Ritual", and got a bit through "Army of the Dead" before I called it quits.
I put another coat on the ceiling, then I realized I needed the wood trim on before I did the tiles. So I stained wood that was left over from the guy who made the house. It's balsa wood, and it's a bit hard/crumbly, but it worked. Fresh, from experience would be very easy to cut through. I used kitchen scissors at first for the base board after staining, but ruined those (oops). Then tried my Dremel with the cutting head. It didn't work well. So I went with scoring on both sides with an xacto, then using pincer-pliers to snap along the line. Kind of like cutting glass or tile. I also had to figure out how to duplicate the window trim in the kitchen from ones that were already done. FORTUNATELY, I have lots of old balsa wood for that. I'm trying to save as much money as I can. So I plan on using this stuff until it runs out.
Then I started laying the tile. I found 900 piece bag of plaster subway tile on Amazon for about $15. I used it all up yesterday and today. I had to order some more since it only covered 1 and a quarter of my walls. I started using Aileen's superbond glue at first, but switched to the good ol' original recipe (the white stuff) because I was getting frustrated with it. I used my xacto to cut, and did pretty good. I fucked up a bit around the window, but this is supposed to be an old, haunted house, so I'm hoping the "dirt" I add, plus a shelf around the top of the tile around the room, will help fix that.
When I ran out of tiles today, I painted my base coat of sage green on the top 3/4 of the walls. I will dirty and age that another day. Then I decided to use the popsicle sticks that came with the house and start snapping off the ends. Again, these were pretty tough, I guess from age, so I xacto'ed on 1 side, then used my sharp pliers to snap off the rounded ends and vary the lengths. I started gluing them down with wood glue, and will stain after they are all laid.
Next steps is finishing the tiling, doing the floorboards, putting the "trim" (teeny dowels" on the baseboard. I need to seal the tiles since they are just plaster. I'm going to use mod podge. Then I'll apply a bit of grout. Staining, then affixing the shelving to the perimeter of the room between the tile and painted walls. Then comes the painty stuff which is my expertise: aging and dirtying the walls. Adding cracks, mold, water stains, etc. all over.
All in all, I have a crick in my neck but this was so satisfying to do. Much better than working on a real house. I'm done for the evening. Time to read (I also read scary books during Sept - Oct) and I'm in the middle of "Hannibal".
