Add Exterior Trim And Then Caulk And Paint It, step by step

First of all, thanks so much for the unbelievable outpouring of well-wishes for our announcement yesterday. It was strong to share our news with you folks. While madly trying to keep up with the 3,000+ (!!) comments, our afternoon post sort of fell by the wayside, so we figured we will share an afternoon one today with you instead. In the meantime, Sherry is cutting and pasting a ton of questions from yesterday’s comments and working on Friday’s Q&A post for you, and I am here to shake my tail feathers about managing to cross a few more things off our sunroom to-do list in this week (yes, feel free to picture that).

So let us talk about three steps that have taken our sunroom from half-baked to feeling a lot more wrapped up: adding trim, caulking, and painting. They are not consistently glamorous project steps (especially installing trim and caulking) but details like those tend to make all the difference (wonky trim and messy caulk can add up to a shoddy looking wrapped up product, even if a room is furnished truly nicely). I originally planned to gloss over the trim-hanging part and dive more deeply into caulking and painting, but then I messed something up and, voila, it felt like info that might be helpful to share. Nothing like celebrating your screw ups, right?

Ok, so we had to add trim to polish off our lately tongue-and-groove planked ceiliing. Originally I was simply going to toss out a swift mention like: “We installed trim to bridge the gaps around the ceiling and the new triangle panels we brought in. To match the other plain lattice-like trim around the rest of the room, we opted not to use typical crown molding. Plus, it spared us from having to calculate how to cut all of tricky crown angles against an angled ceiling.”

But after the trim was installed, we both stepped back and chose it did not look good. Not because it was not crown, but because the 1 x 2″ against the ceiling and the quarter-round against the brick were too puny compared to the heft of the pleasant chunky 1 x 4″ trim piece along the bottom of the triangle.

I had chosen the 1 x 2″ trim piece to run along the freshly lofted ceiling because it most closely resembled the lattice in the rest of the room. The bigger 1 x 4″ trim piece was only there to cover some leftover rough patches from where the previous trim was took out (so something thicker was necessary). But we chose the 1 x 4″ board looked much better than any of the skimpier stuff, so suddenly Sherry and I found ourselves removing trim again… simply 24 hours after putting it up.

We each pried off a side and chose to install 1 x 4″ all around each triangle, so the trim near the ceiling carried all same visual weight – rather than the trim closest to the top looking chintzy. It is hard to judge from this picture below (especially since it is not caulked or painted) but trust me, it looks waaaay better. As for how we hung it, it is mostly a two person job when you are working with such long pieces up on a ladder, so one of us held it in place and the other worked the nail gun (I slipped some wood glue behind each piece for extra hold too).

And while we are on the topic of the trim, it was a bit more challenging than a usual trim project – simply because we were dealing with some angles. Fortunately we had the angle finder handy from the Kreg Crown Pro that we picked up to do crown molding in our last house (though I am sure any angle-finding tool would work). So we simply set it in the nook of the triangle to find our angle.

Then I marked that same angle on our board.

And then I used a circular saw to cut along the line.

Most of the cuts were not 100% ideal, but it was not anything that caulk would not fix. So as trim jobs went, it was a relatively speedy one – even if we did have to do those two triangle sections of it twice.

With trim up, it was time for caulking. Sherry and I typically tag-team steps like this, but outdoor caulk is too VOC-filled to inhale while carrying my baby, so I gladly flew solo. In addition to caulking all of the seams around the trim, there were also a bunch of touch-ups that I hoped to do on the ceiling itself. Call me crazy for taking the time to caulk all of our nail holes in each ceiling plank, but it was totally worth the couple of hours it took for the peace of mind that everything was sealed in and nothing would warp/rot due to the elements or the changing temps outside. Eventually I came up with quite the efficiently system: squirt a dot of caulk in each spot, smoosh in with a finger (dipped in water to assist keep caulk from building up on my skin) and then smooth that over with a damp sponge. The sponge step was the key to a pleasant finish, and it made it go faster too.

None of our before-and-after shots of the caulked holes truly demonstrated the difference (it is one of those things you have to see in person, I guess) but having all of the little distractions taken care of was in fact a big move forward in this ceiling feeling wrapped up.

Then there was painting to deal with. Not that the cream + white + blue + primer + brick combo is not totally the rage these days.

In our heads painting this room was not a big deal. There is like 0.003 square feet of walls, after all (I may have rounded down a smidge). But then we remembered the 15-paned door and the three giant 15-paned windows. URGH. That is a whole lotta mullions.

Okay, I am being dramatic. It was not that bad. It took me about four hours total to apply two coats for full coverage – but I would not call it an exciting job. Oddly sufficient Sherry loves to be the cutter-inner, so she was sad that exterior paint is on the no-no-pregnancy list. Did I hit the jackpot with my trim-painting wife or what? Oh and as for the color, we used Snowbound by Sherwin Williams, since the rest of our white exterior trim is painted that color.

I did my best not to get too much paint on the windows simply to save ourselves time on the back-end from having to scrape all 60 of those window panes with a razor to remove the paint (we learned on the windows upstairs that scraping was a pain whenever primer was involved, so we figured exterior paint would be simply as difficult since it is a more intense formula with a built-in primer). I also tried out a new brush that is specifically meant for this type of job – simply in the name of seeing if it made things easier. In the end after both of us tried it (Sherry for simply a second with a gas mask on because the girl could not resist) we in fact found it harder to use than our usual short-handled brush, but we are glad that we gave it a shot, simply to be sure there is not some magic bullet out there.

With the windows and the door done, it seemed like a cinch to at last get to painting the walls, which I did with a small foam roller for the most part (I did use an angled brush to get into some of the cracks and tight spots but it was mostly a roller job).

With that done, I still had one last paint job to complete: a final coat of blue on the ceiling to hide all of the caulking I’d done. Even though the white caulk blended fairly nicely with the light blue ceiling, it was still noticeable. Unpainted caulk tends to “flash” so that it is visible at certain angles, like the row of caulked nail holes you can see below looking sort of dusty.

Painting a ceiling is one of our least go-to tasks, but since I did not have to edge this one (and it only needed one coat) it was in fact fairly fast. I knocked it out in a hour while Clara was at preschool.

So yeah, not the most exciting updates in the world – but these little fixes truly helped take our “completed” ceiling to being an actual completed ceiling. Oh except for perhaps the missing fans part. Ignore that for now, and let us simply appreciate the difference between how it looked before trim/caulk/paint…

…and after.

And of course I’d be remiss to leave without a before picture of the room when we began.

So we got to cross two more lines off of our to-do list, which puts us that much closer to the part that we are looking forward to the most: the tile floor! Hopefully that is on the docket to get done (er, well, began) this week so that we can have a update for you next week.

• Rip up the old carpeting (more on that here)
  
• Remove the sliding doors and tracks to open things up (more on that here)
  
• Convert outlets to outdoor-safe rain-proof ones with covers (more on that here)
• Add fresh casing to the openings and caulk like crazy to waterproof everything (more on that here)
  
• Demo the old ceiling in hopes of possibly lofting it (get a pro in here for advice) (more on that here)
  
• Remove old beams, reinforce ceiling stability, and re-route electrical for two fans instead of one (more on that here)
• Prime, paint, and install our beadboard ceiling (more on that here)
  
• Add trim around the ceiling and caulk/paint that
• Repaint the columns & interior of the sunroom with white exterior paint (it is right now cream)
• Hang two ceiling fans
• Tile the floors (we picked up something that is outdoor safe and less slick than the glue-stained concrete here)
• Get a rug, furniture, and perhaps even add some outdoor curtains and lanterns/sconces?
• Build an outdoor fireplace like this down the line

It is funny how going into this reno we thought “well it is not a kitchen or a bathroom so it likely will not take that long” – yet it involved ripping out eight doors and a ceiling, adding all new electrical, installing a new ceiling plank by plank, painting a whole bunch of trim and windows and doors. And there are still fans and tiling to be tackled, as well as the dream of adding a fireplace someday. Turns out sunroom renos can be simply as involved as a bathroom or a kitchen makeover. Who knew?