Nursery – Finished!
Well, after finishing with the painting, we had to put up a chair rail. Not that we’d have lots of chairs in the nursery, but we figured it’d look good, and it would also definitely make the green / yellow transition look sharp. Problem is, to do this right, we’d need to carefully mitre all the corners. Sounds like perfect excuse to buy a new toy! So we ran out to our local gourmet woodworking shop and bought a 12″ Delta compound mitre saw, with twin-laser. The lasers made it incredibly easy to cut — just measure the length, put a little mark on the wood, and align one of the two laser lines with the mark. The wood between the lines gets cut away, and you’re left with a perfectly measured piece. Cutting the corner mitres was even easier. I just held two pieces on the corner (so they hung into space and overlapped), and I drew a little line on each board where the other crossed over. Then I put the board on the saw, and pulled the cutting head down until the laser fell across the edge of the piece. Now, it’s just a matter of tilting the saw until the laser and my pencil lines matched, then cut, and bam! Perfect mitre joint! Oh, yeah, having a pneumatic nailer helped a lot, too. I got the entire chair rail up in about 4 hours (and this was the first time I’d ever used a mitre saw, so there was a little learning going on too).
Once done with the rail, Andrea came back and put wood putty in all the nail holes, and then I caulked all along the top. First mistake: doing this after we’d already painted the room. ‘Cause now we had to go back and repaint the yellow where the caulk smeared too far up. Second mistake: not running a fan with open windows. This was over three weeks ago, and my sinuses have still not recovered. Anyway, after putty, and caulk, and sanding, we painted the rail, did touch-up all around the room, and then the next day did some more touch up. Then the furniture arrived (the very next day after we’d finally finished all the paint). Then Andrea went nuts with linens, and clothes, and everything else, and, well, here’s the final room:
