Since I was out of town all weekend (and crushingly, haven't been able to play with my new saw yet!), let's take a swing around the web and see what the last week has brought.

• From the Chicago Tribune comes a few tips: hanging an extra layer of drywall on either side of an existing wall will make a room a lot quieter, and working with glass blocks is much easier if you use a new system that trades mortar for plastic channels and silicone caulk. There's also an autumn checklist for projects that'll help make sure you're insulated for the coming cold.
• Do you have cracks running down your walls? According to the Boston Globe's handyman on call, those cracks might only be in the paint layer and not the wall itself; fixing them might only take a light sanding and a final thin coat of paint. The folks behind the San Francisco Chronicle's Sweat Equity column address cracks that are run a bit deeper and appear at sheetrock joints, explaining why they happen and recommending how you go about repairing them so they look as good as new.
• Do you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of your toilet's water supply coming on and refilling the tank even though nobody's used it? The Ask the Expert column in the Seattle Times recommends dropping a bit of food dye into the tank to help pinpoint where the leak might be.
• Finally, the Philadelphia Inquirer takes a look at "manspaces", from redone subterranean basements to backyard writing sheds, and likes what it sees.

While we're talking about painting, it seems like the right time to mention the taping-off lessons we've learned over the past few years. Every indoor painting job begins with taping off the room -- masking the ceiling, floor, and trim -- and I'm pretty convinced that putting a little more time and energy into doing the job right means that you actually save time painting and cleaning up afterwards. That being said, it can get a bit tiresome and annoying, so anything that makes the taping-off process easier is welcome in my book.

Shannon and I painted every room in our place in Brookline three years ago, and came to love Scotch Ready Mask painting tape. It's actually an impermeable paper tape that has adhesive on only part of its width, meaning that only one edge sticks to the wall (rather than the entire tape). All I can say is that it worked well -- it created nice edges, and it was trivially easy to get off the wall when we were done. Needless to say, when we started planning our trip down to DC to paint the new house, I grabbed a bunch of rolls and put them into the supply crate.

Imagine my confusion, then, when the tape gave me problem after problem as soon as I started using it in DC! I began taping off our guest bedroom, and within minutes of its application, all the Ready Mask tape came peeling down from the walls. I'm not sure if it was the humidity (DC certainly was more humid last weekend than Brookline was three years ago during our month or two of painting) or if the walls were a bit dusty, but in any event, within an hour we had made a trip to our local Capitol Hill hardware store and come back with good ol' Scotch Blue painter's tape. And while it went on without a hitch, we found that it took the occasional bit of ceiling paint with it when we took the blue tape down -- not ideal, but certainly better than a tape that didn't stick in the first place.

The one bit of painting that we have left (other than touching up the ceiling edges!) is the seven new wood windows that are being put in next week, and I'm not sure which painter's tape I'll use for those. I assume that the Ready Mask tape will stick to the glass better than it did to the walls, but window painting is tedious enough without having to deal with masking problems, so I have a feeling that the blue tape will get the call again... we'll see.

Shannon and I took a trip down to Washington, DC this past weekend, both sets of parents in tow, to try to get some painting done on the new house. We painted our current place in Brookline after we moved in, and it took forever (what with needing to move furniture around, and having to time everything so that rooms were available when we needed to use them), so our aim was to avoid that by getting the painting done before we moved down to DC. We were lucky that everything had recently been painted in a white latex by the seller, so we didn't need to do any priming of the walls, and didn't have to do anything to the ceilings or trim for now.

Shannon and her mother put a lot of time and effort into choosing the colors, from amassing about a thousand paint chip strips from various stores to carrying swatches around with them of our just-purchased new sofa and chair to painting entire posterboards with colors that were in consideration (so that they could hold them up against everything and get a better sense of how things would work together). I have to say that the posterboard idea was pure genius; colors that looked fine on the little paint chips from the store looked terrible against the floors and countertops once they were painted onto larger areas, and it really took the bigger sample to get a sense of what would work. Going down to DC, we had only made one firm color choice (for the upstairs and downstairs hallways and the guest bedroom) and had a handful of posterboards ready to be tested in their respective rooms, so we were a little nervous about not having enough time to get everything done. In the end, though, the "probable" colors all tested perfectly, everything ended up available from the same paint company (Benjamin Moore), and everyone was knocked out by how great things came out once the paint was on the walls.

Starting in the front of the house, we painted the dining room and living room in a bright yellow (Goldtone). We originally started out with Restoration Hardware's Butter, having painted Shannon's study here in Brookline in the color and loving it, but the posterboard tester looked terrible against the teak floors and was too vivid against the new sofa and chair fabrics. Shannon and her mother spent a chunk of time with small paint chips, chose a few options to test on a larger scale, and ended up with Goldtone, and it looks awesome in both rooms.

Headed to the back of the house, we wanted to do a tan or beige kitchen, but knew that our marble countertops would make it hard to find a color that didn't clash too terribly. We didn't really have a good starting point for this, but throwing around words like "taupe-y", the ladies again made a few choices and landed on Tucson Tan. (Hysterically, Shannon found herself unable to avoid saying "Toucan Sam" every time she tried to tell someone the paint name, so that's what it's now known as to us.) And while the countertops were the prime mover on the color choice, it also works well with the teak, as well as with the cherry cabinets. In contrast to all the other rooms, we went with a matte finish in the kitchen, as Benjamin Moore advertises it as scrubbable for easier cleaning.

Moving around and up, we knew that we wanted to keep the entryway, hallways, stairs, and guest bedroom pretty simple and easy. To us, that meant going with Linen White, the same paint that we used for more than three-quarters of our home here in Brookline. It's a nice, soft white that tends to take on a warm glow in natural light, and it's also one of the off-whites that Benjamin Moore paint stores stock on their shelves by the truckload. In the picture, the color looks a little greener than it really is; you'll see why that is in the next room.

When you come up the stairs, you're facing our little half-room, which we've taken to calling the "pygmy room." It's going to be our office, and our color starting point was the Restoration Hardware Silver Sage that we used for my office here in Brookline, a color we've liked a lot. Again, though, the Silver Sage was way off when put against the floors upstairs, so a few more choices made it onto posterboard testers. We ended up with Dried Parsley, and I have to say that it came out good enough that this is my current favorite room in the house. (The room is also the most electrically-enabled, with four different circuits, for reasons we can't even begin to guess.)

Finally, we end up in the master bedroom, which was one of the most difficult because of all the competing things we wanted to match. Between the beige-to-ash carpets and our many-variations-on-red bedding, we thought that a color like Manchester Tan might work, but once again, it looked terrible when Shannon tested it out. In another southwestern nod, the winner ended up being Tucson Winds, which came out awesomely.

We started painting around noon on Saturday, and were ecstatic that we were able to get everything done by around 4 PM on Sunday (again, the beauty of not having to paint the trim or ceilings). We had a few painters' tape issues that I'll talk about some other time, but when all's said and done, the house looks amazing and we were sad to have to come back to Brookline for a few more weeks.

One of the small projects I've done in our current home that's made me the happiest is a simple door replacement. When we moved in here, my study had a solid, unpainted wood door (no different than any other room in the apartment). We did a bit of work on doors throughout the place -- painting some, replacing hardware in others -- but never got around to working on the one to the study. (I also never thought to take a good picture of the doorway, hence the bad one here.) And because the room houses enough computers to make heat generation an issue, that door remained closed for most of the air-conditioned summer here in Boston. As a result, we lost out on all the nice light that comes in from the southern-exposure windows in the study, and the hallway stayed pretty cave-like as a result. Shannon and I finally decided that a French door might be in order.

After taking some measurements and learning that the study doorway was both nonstandard and a bit off-square, I headed down to Home Depot to find a simple, unpainted French door that I'd be able to saw down to the correct size. After bringing it home (bungie cords and a roof rack are your friend!), a friend helped me run it over the table saw, and then I used the old door to mark out the locations for the hinge leaves along the jamb of the new one. The wood of the new door was pretty soft, so I had to exercise caution in chiseling out the spots for the hinges, but after attaching them, I was able to hang the door into the frame and check for any spots that I'd have to trim further (none, thankfully!). Finally, I took the door back down and used a hole saw to drill out the spot for the doorknob set, and that was that.

One thing that made me incredibly happy was that the new door came with all the windows pre-wrapped in plastic (you can see the haze over the windows in the unpainted picture), meaning that I was then able to get to priming and painting it without having to tape anything off. (That's a lot of windows to have to tape!) Because of work and whatnot, it took me two days to finish off the painting -- but I love the result, both for how the door looks and the amount of light it lets into our hallway during the times of year that the study has to remain air-conditioned. It's enough that I wish I had replaced the door next to it (leading into the living room) at the same time, but that'll be a job for the next people who live here!