One room painted, many lessons learned

We painted our guest bedroom this weekend. It is now "heirloom lace," which means it's a sort of creamy off-white that I can't really describe. I think it looks pretty nice. We have some touching-up to do, and we have to figure out how to clean the floors, but it's looking nice.

We learned that fake TSP (the phosphate is illegal here because of environmental legislation) takes the finish right off our floors (or at least cleans them really well). Hooray for drip marks. We also learned that paint can go through a heavy canvas drop cloth pretty quickly. I really wish we had the huge and scary drop cloths my dad has. Ah, well. Live and learn. Next time, the plastic tarp will go down first. Most of the floors need to be refinished anyhow. I think I'm going to find out how much getting all the remaining floors sanded would cost. Staining and protecting are not a big deal. There's also the option of chemically resurfacing--we just need to get a bunch of chemicals, go into the closet, and figure out what protectant is on the floors now. This is something we need to do anyhow for the purposes of cleaning the floors.

Raking is hard work. I learned that yesterday too.

All right. Back to work.