Technically my last post contained some "during" pictures, but since removing the wallpaper only took about 30 minutes I figured it didn't really count.
After removing the wallpaper came possibly the hardest part of the renovation: the brief period of time when I attempted to remove the wallpaper glue from the plaster. It was three hours of scraping and I only went about two feet and destroyed some plaster and patching on my way. Ug.
I didn't take a picture of that part.
I made an executive decision and decided to spackle over the entire room. It tells you something about scraping wall paper glue that I thought this was the better option. So off I went to Lowes ♥ to buy a 50 pound pail of joint compound.
JD happened to call around that time and told me to bring along my 15-year-old nephew (who was on vacation) to lug the pail of spackle for me. Since I had already been defeated by a glue-covered wall there was no way I was going to let a pail of spackle mock my weakness too. I sweetly told JD I would do that, hung up, told my nephew to have fun playing video games while I was gone, and headed off to Lowes. I cart a thirty-pound kid around all day, how heavy could a pail be?
Gentle readers, if you ever feel the need to purchase a 50 pound pail of spackle (that turns out to actually weigh 62 pounds) I strongly advise you to bring along a 15-year-old nephew OR ask a sales associate to assist you. My room renovation nearly died right there in the aisle of Lowes.
At the end of it all I had my pail of spackle, a nice pail-shaped bruise on my thigh where I used my leg to heft the pail into the cart, and a broken cart. And I suffered guilt-ridden dreams about the broken cart that night, which even I know is silly. But still.... I feel sooooooo guuuuillllty!!!! Poor cart.
Anyway, on to the pictures! When last we left the wall it looked something like this:
The part between the windows is one of the places where you can press against the wall and move it back and forth.
After about six hours of spackling the wall looked like this:
The six hours of spackling were not nearly as painful as they sounded since I had my friend Hillary there to keep me company through the first part, and my mom there helping me spackle for the last part. She did the window to the closet in the picture below. Soooooo niiiiice!
Thank you ladies, you made the job 100% more manageable.
After the first layer of spackle dried, I wet sanded it all, then patched some more, then wet sanded some more, then JD primed the ceiling, then we ran out of primer! By then it was about 2am on Friday night. Kids come back Saturday morning. Eeek!
But let's rewind a day to the best surprise of the renovation. We took up a corner of the old carpet and found that the floor has a layer of wood-patterned laminate that is in really excellent condition, considering the age.
And this picture also demonstrates why you should wait until AFTER the spackling and wet sanding to remove the old carpet. Messy. We left the rest of the carpet pad in place until after the ceiling and wall painting was done.
I know most people would not be thrilled to find forty-year-old laminate under their carpets, but considering our worst-case scenario was lead-paint covered hardwoods, and our best-case scenario was plywood subfloor, the laminate looked pretty darn good.
Friday afternoon, after JD came home from work, I stole him for a trip to IKEA. I had a vision of several RAST dressers (which I would paint):
And a built-in desk with little junior office chairs:
So cute!
In reality the RAST dressers were waaaaay smaller than I was imagining, so we scrapped that idea and went with the Expedit storage system instead. I am still working on this part of the room, so you will have to wait for the AFTER pictures next week to see how it all turned out.
Fast forward to Friday night at 2am. We are exhausted. JD has primed and painted the ceiling. I have pulled about a million carpet nails and about a billion and a half little staples out of the floor. We retire for a much needed five hours of sleep.
Saturday morning, FINALLY, we start painting:
Of course, the kids came home before it was all done. Ah, well. AND they immediately wanted to help. Oh God. Suffice it to say that the white rug in the living room now has little blue sneaker prints across it and the butt of Evie's purple fleece pants is sporting a permanent blue streak.
This is her, trying to show me her "pouty face" after I said Ian got to paint first.
She failed.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Mr. Serious is steadfastly ignoring our silliness.
And then Evie finally got into the action.
If all else fails, STAB IT WITH THE BRUSH!
The result:
This is the section of wall where we are going to allow "wall drawing." In other words, if they want to draw on the walls they can draw here. Anywhere else and they will be in BIG TROUBLE.
And that is the end of the DURING post! Oh, I lied. One more thing. When we took up the carpet we found another thing. ANTS. Apparently they live under the carpets. Blaaarg. I never even imagined that was possible. Time for some serious ant bait. And the rest of the carpets in the house are not long for the world. Or at least this house.
And since that is a sour note to leave you on, here is a fun video I took on moving-in day so you can see what this area of the house looked like before we moved our stuff in:
I made several videos showing the whole house. I'll post those up in a series at some point.
Have a great weekend!
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