The Bedroom Walls: Completed

It is no small feat that our bedroom walls are finally painted. What Was once a warm tan wall with pastel textured wallpaper is no a soothing mint green.

Here is the before, from our second walk-through, the one that sealed the deal that we were buying this house.

Starting in June we began working on the east wall of the bedroom. Stripping the wallpaper (don’t you just love it? I sure did. NOT). We finally got it off after hours (seriously it was ridiculous) of work and our motivation ground to a halt. Other house projects were being worked on simultaneously, and we were pretty darn sick of being in our bedroom. So time ticked by.

Finally, after Bryan’s birthday on September 6th, we got ourselves into gear and determined we were getting the whole thing over and done with. So of the course of three days, we did.

First we washed the wall (sans wallpaper) to get the remaining glue off and to prepare for the next step, spackling. Then Bryan spackled (to get rid of the gouges from scrapping the paper off and the holes left by hooks, screws, moving curtains and blinds around, scones, the electric baseboards, and old electric boxes that were no longer used for an outdated phone line, and a plug for music output (that also no linger worked/speakers removed prior to us moving in). We spackled and patched 199 holes in those four walls. Seriously, I counted. 199 holes. If you include the holes in the bathroom, we are over 250. But the bathroom is a project for another time. Maybe another year. Probably another year. We don’t want to go there. Not yet. I don’t understand what happened to those bedroom walls but they are finally hole free and ready to rock.

Bizarre, it’s a bad nighttime photo, and there is a weird ghostly light floating in there, but the bed is made and I’m a bit to busy working on these fun quotes for friends to take another… Anyways, this is the view from our bedroom door, the chair really doesn’t cut into the walk way like it appears in this picture. The room is so much larger than we realized, since our bed has literally always been floating 2-3 feet away from the wall where the low wide dresser now is. We do like it much better on the far side of the room, but the floor plan still isn’t great. the dressers may be shuffled around some more, and the chair as well. There would be enough room to fit two chairs in there, so down the line that may be something we add.

Here is a much better view during daylight, the floor is nicely cluttered up with the rods for the curtains in front of the door, and the basket and blanket the cats like to curl up in/on during the day to watch the birds in the bird feeder. Plus there are no switch plate covers in here right now since we want to get some nice fresh ones that aren’t yellowed, or painted over like most of them are. So it’s far from finished in here. In fact, we haven’t hung anything up yet, probably because we don’t want to put any holes in these walls.

It’s amazing how accomplishing something seemingly so minor when I think back to all of the other projects we’ve gotten done in the last 7 months really makes all the difference in the world. This was by far a very time intensive project and the whole house feels that much more us. I can so totally live with the crazy laminate cabinets in our bathroom for a good long while. I can probably even live without art on the walls in our room, or switch plate covers, and the trim and ceiling. I’m just taking in the new color in all it’s glory. The pressure of getting things done around here for the first time has chilled out. Maybe it’s the bedroom walls, and our room finally has some semblance of order, or maybe it’s that the major projects are done. Either way, some relaxing quality time together without feeling like I’m not accomplishing what I need to has been feeling great.

Hurrah. Bryan would like curtains up asap though, so I really need to decide if I’m making them longer so I can hang them from the ceiling to soften the room up a bit and make it seem a bit more cozy, or hang them back at a similar place. Maybe I’ll do that next week.