Misadventures in new condo'ing

Summary of misadventures thus far (the day before moving in):

We bought a fancy closet organizer. It will be awesome. It's still not in, because when we ripped out the existing shelf and hang bar, the moulding was glued to the wall and ripped off the underlying paint. No big deal...we spackled and sanded, and prepared to paint the upper half of the closet, above the line at the bottom of the moulding. The previous owner had painted the bottom of the closet steel blue to match the bedroom walls, but left the upper part cream. We taped the edges, found the matching paint, and started painting the edges. It was the wrong color. Forty-five minutes later our entire closet matched the hallway outside the condo. We have yet to figure out why the previous owner, who painted the common areas on commission, kept the common area paint colors under the sink of the guest bathroom.

I learned to install sealant by caulking the edge of the tub with clear silicone and questionable lighting. I started to get the hang of it about 3/4 of the way around the tub. There are some holes that need to be patched one of these years.

I learned to remove caulking by scraping up the edge of the sink. I think white caulk will make it look better. If not, I get to pick a new color for the master bath.

Speaking of new colors...I took down the too-industrial-looking pipe fixture towel bar (yeah, weird, right?) in the guest bath, spackled the holes, and dug out the paint from underneath the sink. Learning from the closet mishap, I carefully matched the dried paint on the side of the can to the wall. San compared, and we came to agreement on the most likely color. Six days later, there are still too dark spots on the wall. So I get to pick a new color for the guest bath, too.

San created his own damage in the second bedroom closet. He took the hang bar out so that he could put shelving in for his comics. As part of this, he decided to lower the shelf to sit evenly on the moulding. Sometime in the past, someone raised only the ends by adding a 1 inch high piece of moulding to provide more clearance for the hang bar. Once he tore into it, San found holes all the way through the moulding and the drywall that had been drilled to install the hang bar, gobs of paint that had collected on top of the short upper moulding (which had now been removed) and general mayhem. We now need to replace some moulding, scrape, smooth and patch some paint, and again paint yet another closet.

When I bought the place, we thought that we didn't have to paint anything because the previous owner was a professional painter.

Before we even started, I learned how to stain a kitchen cart. It went pretty well, except for the exorbitant amount of dust that collected on the first coat of stain while it was tacky. I guess that's the downside of keeping the windows open to allow for the proper ventilation that the authors of the warnings on the can are so worried about.

The sixth (or eleventh maybe, I'm losing count) trip to Home Depot will be to pick up white sealant, moulding, wood primer, paint...and drywall anchors so we can finish installing the tall bookcases...