Besides the large living room, there was one easily sealed off part that also needed to be stripped and repainted: the (unused) foyer. The windows and windowsills here were also in bad shape externally, so that also needed fixing.

We don’t actually use the foyer as an entrance (no one in Hawaii seems to, there’s always a side entrance used), so there would be no loss to sealing it off for a while. I had planned two weeks to strip and paint it, but as usual that was quite a bit optimistic.

The foyer is separated from the living room by a cased opening. This needed to be stripped first, before the opening is sealed with plastic.

The weird thing about the foyer is that the wall planking is not planed smooth like everywhere else, they’re just sawed and quite rough. The wall on the right in the picture above is the back wall of the kitchen cabinets, so I guess they just used planks planed on one side for the exterior wall and must have “forgotten” that the foyer was going to be here. I don’t know what the excuse is for the wall on the left side, which is an exterior wall, not being planed. (Maybe they accidentally put that facing outwards, I haven’t pulled off the vinyl siding to check.)

In any case, the rough nature of the wall made it much, much harder to strip than the normal, planed walls, since the paint sticks in all the valleys. Then there was the termite damage. This area had by far the worst damage I’ve encountered so far. I used more than a full gallon of Bondo for all the repairs.

The walls here had pretty severe termite damage.

The outermost (leftmost) plank in this wall was particularly bad. I pretty much reconstructed the entire plank in Bondo before I was done. I also encountered the back sides of some repairs I’d made from the kitchen side.

The walls are done here, but the white trim on the cased opening remains.

With all the painting done here, it was time to take the windows out for stripping and painting.

Once all the interior painting was done, we took the windows out for stripping, re-glazing, and painting, so we’ve had the window opening covered by a sheet of plastic for a while now. It takes a long time for glazing putty to harden here, I’ve been waiting to paint the windows for more than two weeks at this point.

At some point I also have to strip and paint the window frame, but I don’t want to do that too early since I don’t want to have to staple the plastic back up with fresh paint. Once the windows are painted, I’ll tackle the window frame. While I’m waiting on the putty to cure, I’m trying to make some progress on some cabinets doors instead.