Badly painted trim haunts my dreams

Another...uh...questionable design choice of the past owners is the weird paint brownish paint color that appears throughout the house.  It's not even brown, it's like a peachy-brown-horrible-pukey color, unevenly applied to fixtures like trim, ceiling beams, and the kitchen cabinets.

Behold:

 This color covered all of the crown molding in the living room and dining area.  That's a lot of crown molding.  The molding itself is original to the house (I think, who knows, I'm making stuff up as I go along) and in decent shape.  It looks like it's made of plaster (again, making stuff up here) so the various cracks give it charm, I think.  Brown paint, not so charming.

One of my first projects was getting to work on painting over the horrible molding.  The uneven brown paint just made it look dirty and the effect wasn't pleasing on the eyes.  I picked up some Home Depot Freshaire paint in semi-gloss - this brand is being discontinued and it was on sale for $14, later on clearance for $5 so I literally have 10 cans - and went to town.  I'd never painted trim before, and I ended up using painters tape only along the bottom of the molding.  Since the molding is old and uneven, I thought using tape would give me a cleaner line along the bottom.  This method worked pretty well, and I didn't care about getting paint on the ceilings since they were scheduled to be re-painted as well.

Painting trim was my after-work project for over a week.  Every day I'd drive to the new house (which we hadn't moved into yet) after work at 7 or 8, change into my painting clothes, and paint for a few hours.  Really fun.  Check out alllll the dirty-looking crevices I had to fill with nice white paint:

It took FOREVER.  I had to do 3 or 4 coats of white paint to fully cover the brown, which is a really daunting task when you're looking around the room at a huge expanse of ugly trim at 9pm on a Tuesday.  But I finished!  All of the crown molding is now finished and it looks fab, if I do say so myself. 

(this picture was pre-ceiling painting so please ignore the dingy dirty ceiling)

It makes such a difference in the room that I'm now seriously considering re-painting the kitchen cabinets until we get around to a kitchen remodel.  It looks so crisp and clean against the newly painted walls, I'd say that it was worth the effort despite how miserable I was at the time.

Now to finish painting the baseboard and the rest of the trim around the house.  The fun just don't stop around here!