Man its been five weeks since our last post!!!!!! Too Much Time!!!!

We can't believe that its been five weeks since our last post.  Time is flying by and we're getting more and more done but still not fast enough for everybody's desires.

The winter is here and its been colder than,,,,,, well pretty cold and lots of snow and ice and more snow and more rain and ice.  Anyway,,,, here's what we've been doing.

We have concentrated on the kitchen and its been a fun but lots of labor and some frustration.  And, as usual we always start on the ceiling and work to the floor.  (We stabilized the floor underneath this summer so we don't have to worry about that now.)

We decided to try to make the ceiling appear to be tin but we didn't want to actually put tin on the ceiling.  So, we located a series of vinyl ceiling tile made by Armstrong that could be painted.  Jane painted each tile three times!  First with a sage green, then she blotted each tile with a red and finally she glazed each tile with a gold glaze.  (200 of them buggers)  

We think the tiles turned out perfect.  The walls of the kitchen are yellow so the green and red accent colors gave us the effect we were looking for.  The gold glaze provided a "glare" or tin look when the lights shine on the ceiling.  



While Jane was painting the tiles I was busy preparing the old ceiling.  The old ceiling wall board was so old and fragile that we didn't think the tile would adhere to the ceiling.  So, we put 1and 1/4" lattice boards on the ceiling to fit the placement of the tiles.  This was time consuming but boy are we glad we did it.





Next we had to make "square".  As y0u may know in older homes, especially ones that are 100 years old, nothing is square or plumb anymore.  So we spent about a half a day trying to get square for our first ceiling tile.   This turned out to be a waste of time as were several other instructions in the tile box.  Its best to start on a wall and work to the other wall in an older home.  You can always cut the last row of tiles to fit the last wall covered.  Believe me, this is the better way, I don't care what Armstrong or DYI says.[Image][Image] After a long two or three days, several marriage counselor meetings and some serious praying, we were able to start the application process.  Guess what the strips were in the wrong place and had to be moved along the way.   Go figure!


















 Finally,  we got to the final, little bitty, pain in the neck tile.  Jane had to claim victory and proclaim,,,,,,,,, well, never mind.   Notice the pole with the towel, well thats how we glued the last three small tiles in place since the wood strips would not fit there either.  It worked so there.

Not being satisfied with the previous work, we decided to do another thing or two to accent the kitchen.  We actually were running out of tiles and didn't want to buy another expensive box so we built a display cabinet to cover the area we were short of ceiling tiles for.  (don't worry about the grammar)

This little beauty only took two days to finish which was a snap compared to the ceiling tiles.

We will have "rope lights" on the inside and halogen lights in the bottom to provide lighting on the cook top so it turned out pretty good.  You'll see this again in another post with the moulding and more finished.  It gives a good transition from the ceiling to the wall and ties them together.


I'm tired just writing about this work so I think I'll take a little break and come back with another post later on today.  With the weather here, I'm afraid I'll loose the post if I don't post it now.  


Come back shortly, We'll have more to review.