Finally.  All the primer is on, and the painting that needs to be done with the sprayer is finished.  Now it is up to me and Toby to get the color on the walls.
Pop had agreed to come over and work on Friday (I would take a vacation day) and get this painting finished.  He drove up Thursday evening and we spent almost 3 hours doing last minute painting prep.  (It never seems to end.)  We got started early Friday with 3 goals : For all the unpainted areas (kids rooms, bathroom, laundry room, office) primer, ceiling finish, and baseboard / crown moulding high gloss finish.
Primer went relatively smoothly.  We used the airless sprayer that Kevin S. let us borrow.  This time, though, Pop had bought a set of goggles that has a roll of plastic that can be advanced when the spray fogs the lens.   

No more stopping every 5-6 minutes to wipe his glasses.

The ceiling went on easily as well.  Then it was time for the baseboard/ crown moulding.  We masked off the walls and the ceiling with a nifty tool that Pop had bought.  It was much faster than what we had done before, but still took a looong time.  It was 6:30p before we began to paint and 9:45p before the equipment was clean and we could call it a night.  All in all, the painting itself was maybe 3 hours, maybe.  The rest of the time was the prep, the masking and the cleaning.  The kids and Toby helped pull the tape and masking paper off the walls.  Max wrapped himself up in it, and became ‘Tape Boy’.  The picture below doesn’t do ‘Tape Boy’ justice.  It was taken in the early stages and we didn’t get a picture of the final tranformation.

An early stage of Tape Boy

Saturday, Kevin S. came over and performed a miracle.  One of the doors that we had bought came with the wrong swing.  But since it was a special order door, it couldn’t be returned.  I thought we were going to have to hang the door upside down to get it to work the way we wanted.  Kevin did his magic and in about 45 minutes the door was hung and swinging the right way.  Hooray.  While Kevin and I worked on installing more floors, Pop installed a drawer under the stairs.  I helped a little bit with some of the tricky work.

Finished floor in the Laundry room.

Helping Pop out of a tight space.

The drawer that Pop installed.

The door that Kevin saved.

The past 2 weekends had a lot of work being accomplished.  Firstly, on Saturday, 24 Oct, the cabinet installation was completed.  All the crown moulding was installed, the drawers were adjusted and now Toby is happy.  While they were working on the cabinets, Pop and I were doing more prep for paint work.  We used a lot of caulking and spackle.  Pop bought really nifty spackle.  This stuff is pink when it goes on, but turns white when it is dry.  You don’t have to wonder if your patch is dry.  My fingers were sore from smoothing the caulking.
Sunday, Toby and I painted the color of the main rooms.  Lucy wanted to help as well.  She started off with the roller, then moved to the brush and finally became the project photographer.

The Wagner TurboRoll that we are using is awesome.  As the pictures above show, even a 5 year old can be a painter.  But seriously, this short video is truth!  But what the video doesn’t tell you is that this thing takes a looooong time to clean up.  We had plans to have dinner with our friends and watch the Angels vs. Yankees ball game (on Sunday because Saturday was rained out), but I was late because I wanted to finish a couple of walls.  Then I was even later because I ended up cleaning it in the dark!  I got to dinner just before the wheels came off the Angles bus in the 8th inning and watched them lose.  🙁  The TurboRoll really does cut down on paint time and effort, but watch out for the cleaning overhead.

Like I mentioned before, all the lower cabinets are slide outs .  No fixed shelves for Toby!  Below are a couple pictures of the lower cabinet pullouts and toe kick drawers.

And Toby had areas for the trash cans made with slide outs as well.

A couple of weekends ago, Lucy had given Pop the gift of sickness.  When Pop came over Saturday, he did not look good.  YaYa kept the work day to a short one, trying to keep Pop healthy (or at least not getting worse).  It didn’t help.  Sunday, she took him to the Urgent Care and he was diagnosed with Bronchitis.  Pop was in bed for a couple of days, but recovered enough to get to Carp on Friday to be here for the delivery of the kitchen cabinets and the final day of Quoc working on the furnace.   Or, I should say the scheduled delivery of the kitchen cabinets and the scheduled working of Quoc.
When I got home from work, no one was working, and Pop had been working alone all day.  At 12:30p He had gotten a call from the cabinet people that they were leaving LA.  At 5:30p they still had not arrived.  We got a later call saying that their U-Haul truck had broken down and they would be on site on Saturday morning.  They arrived at 7:15a and began to work.  All day long 4 people toiled to get the cabinets installed.  A lot of the finish work was done here, on site.  Sanding, painting, etc. was done in the front yard.  They worked until 7:30p.  Here are some pictures of what was done by Saturday night.

On Sunday, they returned to finish at 8:30a.  I was in and out during the day, and returned at 8:30p to see that they were still working.  They had put up most of the crown moulding and adjusted most of the drawer rails.  What is not visible in the pictures is that every lower cabinet has pullout drawers instead of shelves, even the pantry.  Also, we had ‘toe kick’ drawers installed in each lower cabinet.  These drawers make great places to store things that you don’t access very often.  We use the ‘toe kick’ drawers that Pop built upstairs to hold batteries, screwdrivers, etc.  I’ll try to get some pictures of the pullouts and the toe kick drawers posted.

Although the work continued late into Sunday night, some work just didn’t get completed.  Also, we wanted to see the cabinets in the daylight as a ‘final inspection’.  They will be back next Saturday for a few short hours (hopefully) to finish up.
Here are pictures of what we have now.  The first picture shows the island.  We have decided to add a table to the island to make an “L” shape.  Obviously, the table top part is not installed yet.

The minimum floor was installed.  We are ready for the kitchen cabinets to be installed next Saturday. 

Kevin, Pop and I (and Max for a little while) were able to complete the family room and kitchen floors in 1 full (very full) day.  A few weeks ago, I purchased a power nailer off of ebay.  Previously we had rented a power nailer, but since we were going to be installing the floors in sections, over many weeks, we figured it would be cheaper to buy it. 

Kevin was the nailer, Pop was the cutter and I was everything else, the wood carrier, the piece spreader, the cork layer, the trash cleaner-upper.  Max was my trash helper and the picture taker for a little while.

It was a long day with lots of time spent on hands and knees, but the results were amazing.  Toby came down and giggled when she could walk on the floors without shoes. 

We used 1/4″ cork sheets for the underlayment