The End of Plaster, the Beginning of Primer

Well, this doesn't have anything to do with plaster or primer, but this picture is to represent the many, many projects that my father-in-law finished during his final two days with us (while he had the flu). He installed cement board (ready for tile) in both bathrooms, fixed the crawlspace window, put the second layer of subfloor in the entryway, did the plaster finishwork on the living room window, installed new plumbing things (the names of which I don't know...), took the actual fan part of the whole house fan out, fixed our fence....the list goes on. But here at least is the cement board:  

And his wife was equally helpful. In this picture she is directly under where the huge, unsightly 3'x3' whole house fan vent used to be. Now, miraculously, it is seamlessly smooth ceiling. This is thanks to her work, Jonathan's work, and some quick finish-work by our kind stake president, who just dropped by out of the goodness of his heart (and maybe to check up on how we were treating his drywall tools :-)

With the dusty work done, we have started to prime. In a normal situation, my corner-cutting nature would have dictated using a combination paint/primer, but we need to seal in the smoke smell and stains, so we are using Kiltz Original oil based primer, which is the real deal.

So far we have done most of the two biggest rooms (living room & master bed/bath)! Yesterday we jumped in and primed the fireplace because it looked more fun than just priming walls.

Cleaning the brick! (not sure how long this lasted...Jonathan took the picture)

Yeah, yeah...this is a controversial picture for several reasons. What?! Are you just going to paint over your paneling? Yes. We are. Two reasons: our realtor/home flipping friend said that it won't effect resale value at all (at least here), and 2) It's quick.  I don't mind the look as long as the paint job is nice. We are probably going to put shelves on this wall anyway. Another controversy: painting brick. Yep, we just...did. I read a lot of tutorials and also a lot of people saying that they don't like the look, but I vastly prefer it to the brown brick, and we're not interested in framing it out.  After we finished this wall  the room looked a LOT smaller! The dark wall really stretched out the room. We're interested to see what the paint does for it.