The first coat

In the home stretch with finishing up the cottage for rentals. The goal for this weekend is to get a first coat of paint on the treads. I was nervous coming back to see if the primer took to my paint job after I wasn't sure if I neutralized the TSP enough. I ran my hand over the primer and it seemed to have been cured to a pretty hard finish. There were some areas over the patched nail holes that were a little dicey, but I'm blaming the DAP patching compound rather than TPS. 

Another coat of primer to make it less streaky.

There were a few areas that the primer was streaky especially on the stairs where I tried to use the triple thick primer so I went back through and spot primed things to get a better finish. After that dried, I caulked all the gaps I could find with acrylic caulk. I used a squeeze bottle rather than a caulk gun and smoothed it out with a caulk tool. After that dried, I went for the porch paint. I mixed in some fine sand for texture and stirred for a few minutes. 

For the stairs I tried to paint without using tape. I want to learn how to cut edges without relying on tape since I find that no matter what I do, the paint will seep through gaps in the tape. The main thing is patience because once you lose focus and start rushing, then things get sloppy. Initially I tried using tape on the bottom of the treads. But that didn't seem to work and ended up causing some paint to get on the risers. I'll have to fix that up when I paint the riser and after that switched over to just going freehand for all of it.

I found it easy to wet the brush beforehand to give the paint some flow to the paint and after getting enamored by that approach I pushed it too hard by going back to the well too many times until I ended up with too watery of a coat. So I backed off and finished the first coat with more or less clean lines.

In the main house, my brother went about tearing down the acoustic ceiling. As he was tearing down the tiles, a dead mouse fell out which he needed me to remove. Luckily it seems like there hasn't been too many signs of bugs or vermin so I'm hoping that was just a straggler. After he removed the tiles, I got to see the full extent of the ceiling. It's a plaster ceiling with lots of old glue where I'm guessing other acoustic tiles were installed. Since this area was covered up, this is where they didn't care about astetics and just ran all the ductwork and wires. There's a large tangle of electrical wires that all join up here. With my plans to go to a Unico system, that should address the ductwork. I'm assuming an electrician can fish the wires into the ceiling to clean up the rats nest of wires, but that's task for another day.