Wow, that’s 18 months without an update. 2023 was pretty crazy. As I’m writing this update we’re living in a new house, in a new country, and I’m simply not going to be able to detail everything that’s happened. I’ll just give a quick summary.

The last house-related update was posted in June of 2022, where we had stripped and repainted the foyer. At that point, the living room and one of the bathrooms was the remaining lead-painted rooms so we proceeded directly to stripping and painting the living room in the summer of 2022.

At this point it had been decided that our long-talked about move to Sweden would take place in summer of 2023, less than a year from now. This meant we had a hard deadline for the work we wanted to do to get the house ready for sale, so when my parents came for their customary “November in Hawaii” visit, my Dad and I decided to rip out the carpet to get started on putting in a new floor in the master bedroom.

The master bedroom, or “the addition”, was the part of the house that was added in the 80s sometime. It was in decent shape compared to the rest of the house when we moved in (and didn’t have lead paint) so it had never been a priority to do anything about it. However, it had a pretty bad carpet and paint, and some of the taped joints in the ceiling were loose. It should be “pretty quick” to just tear out the carpet and replace with click-in flooring and repaint it. Famous last words.

Of course this is never as quick as you imagine, but it really didn’t take that long. Since this is the only room in the house that has drywall, being new enough that single-wall construction had finally gone out of fashion in Hawaii, I also had the opportunity to learn a new skill.

Initially we were just going to repaint the walls and ceiling but I really wanted to get rid of the textured ceiling and the loose tapes provided the needed motivation to tear off all the texture from the ceiling and redo the loose tapes.

In addition to the loose tapes, the boards themselves were sagging noticeably between the joists, so I ended up getting a fair amount of practice in filling in the depressions with mud. The results were by no means perfect, but it sure looks a lot better than it did before.

With that mud work under my belt I also decided to skim coat the walls to get rid of the texture in the old paint. This also took some practice but after watching a number of youtube videos of people doing this it came out pretty good, and definitely “better than before” which by now had become our motto since we were under time pressure.

After looking at a bunch of different click-type floors, “luxury vinyl plank”, etc, at the local stores and not being very happy with them at all, we went with engineered bamboo from Cali. Luckily you could order this through Lowe’s, I shudder to think what that would have cost to ship otherwise. I think the flooring weighed 150 pounds…

Putting the flooring in was straightforward, although there was a fair amount of complicated cutting in the closet and the entrance stairs.

When all was said and done it was now the end of January, so the “pretty quick” redo of the master bedroom ended up taking two months. Given how much nicer it ended up being we were kind of thinking we should have done it a long time ago…

By now the master bath stood out like a sore thumb, since it still had the same textured ceiling and walls the bedroom had. We pushed on and redid the ceiling the same way. The walls we just repainted without skim coating. It definitely looked better than before.

Now we were really running out of time, though. For tax-related reasons, it would be very beneficial to sell the house before we became Swedish residents (Sweden does not have any exemptions to the roughly 30% tax you have to pay on the gains from property sold abroad) and there were a bunch of little things that needed doing. For example, some of the cabinet doors (that we removed basically the day we moved in) were still not repainted. This became largely the focus of May and June of 2023, and on June 14 I finally mounted the last repainted door in the kitchen!

There was also a lot of repainting of exterior paint that was in bad shape over those last months. In particular, the paint on the roof of the garage and addition was not in good shape. We had this painted before we added the solar panels, but I’ve been very unhappy about the performance of that paint. It was very chalky and did not have a tight finish, which meant that it attracted a lot of growth and quickly became almost black. I had just pressure washed it and decided I would just paint it with some high-quality Benjamin Moore DTM roof paint.

I painted this with a roller and it actually was pretty quick. The hardest was to find suitable times to do it since the roof is too hot in full sun and you obviously can’t do it when it rains. Finding those elusive “cloudy but not raining” times in Hilo is not so easy.

The garage walls had so far only been spot painted where the old paint was flaking (which is obvious from the picture above) but that ended up getting a complete wash and repaint, as did a lot of the addition.

Since we were working until basically a month before the move would happen, we’d all but given up hope of getting the house sold before the move, but with the help of our awesome realtor Chantel Smith at Century 21 in Hilo we managed to get an offer and close the sale on July 27, the day we left Hilo. I’ll talk more about the move in the next post, which hopefully won’t be in 18 months from now…