Nothing is ever simple...

Mr. Kluges said I could post about the house here, too, so I will! This here post is a big old complaint, so feel free to skip it if you'd like!

File this under: "Nothing with this house is ever simple!"
(There's another example I'm going to have to share soon, but Penguin's decided she's had enough exersaucer time, so that means I've had enough computer time!)

We decided to fix some cracks in Penguin's room before painting it. We're lucky enough to have Mr. Kluges's parents coming next weekend & mine coming the weekend after to help out, so we figured we'd try to get this multi-day process going so it could be done in time for our helpers to paint it. Well... we scraped out the cracks down to good plaster, Mr. Kluges mixed up some goo to put in them, and sprayed the cracks/wall with water as recommended because otherwise the plaster soaks up the water in the goo too quickly and it doesn't cure right. He came back a bit later to find that the paint near the cracks was now wanting to come off in big chunks... It turns out that one of the early layers of paint is calcimine. That's bad. It means that newer paint won't stick to it well. Like, humidity or water (!) affect it differently or something (Mr. Kluges did the research; I'm just glossing over here...) so the layers separate and ... you've got big chunks of paint coming off.

The solution - remove all the paint chunks/scrape the paint all away. Wash the chalky calcimine paint off with 2-4 washes with soapy water. Follow with 1-2 washes of clear water. Follow with a coat of calcimine covering primer. Then you can finally paint the wall - twice.

So we get to add that time-consuming process to the crack-fixing before we can paint. I think Penguin might end up getting moved into the guest room until we're done with hers!