Progress: The Kids'/Hall Bathroom

I just couldn't take that wallpaper any longer.  So one day I started pulling the wallpaper down. I'd read about a few different methods on a blog I read. She said her experiences with wallpaper hadn't been too bad, so I was hoping for a similar experience. Of the methods on the blog, I had the materials on hand to try only one. I got almost boiling water and spread it on the wallpaper. Then I started peeling. 

I did not have the same experience as the blogger. 

As a reminder, here's what the bathroom used to look like. There's this front part that had the wallpaper and border. 

Then there's the room with the toilet and tub. It didn't have wallpaper (thank goodness!) but it had a blue paint that I wasn't a fan of, didn't match the shower curtain they had and was a general mess, complete with brush strokes, unsanded patches and what looked to be big clumps of dust.

Now, back to wallpaper peeling. In an hour or two during Bart's nap I got a small portion of the wall next to the mirror done. Yikes!  The wallpaper came off in two layers. The top layer was waterproof and came off easily. Then I treated the second layer that was more papery with water and scraped it off. It was rough.  That evening Walter and I worked on it together and over the course of a few more hours we finished the rest of the bathroom.  This time we used hot water and vinegar.  I think it helped a little more, but it was still a mess. Some areas came off really easily while others were practically fused with the wall and impossible to separate.  There were lots of patches where the top layer of the sheet rock was torn off as we tried to scrape the wallpaper off.  There were also patches where, not wanting to have to dig into the wall, we left some small patches of wallpaper.  I was hoping I could sand it down and/or spackle over it.  We did finally get some wallpaper remover spray from Lowe's that was good, but just couldn't get some parts.  

I think the walls probably were not prepped correctly when they did the wallpaper.  My guess is they had removed wallpaper themselves (We found a tiny remnant just behind the mirror.) and had some dug out spots themselves.  Maybe that even why they wallpaperd the bathroom to begin with.  It's hard to get a smooth wall, as I well know.  At any rate, now I know what the weird texture was in the painted part of the bathroom.  It was spots where they couldn't get the wallpaper fibers all the way off the wall.

I certainly didn't want our paint job to look anything like what the previous owners had done.  I had to get those walls looking smooth.  I sanded and spackled my heart out but I still couldn't get the wall smooth where there were the remaining wallpaper fibers.  Arg!  I decided to go ahead and prime the wall (It needed it with all the repairs I'd done!) and see how it looked primed.  After sanding and spackling so much it was beginning to be difficult to see what was what any more.  Sure enough, it was clear where the fibers were.  Thankfully, now that they were primed they were solid and sanded down easily!  I'm really happy with the wall.  It's probably my biggest accomplishment thus far.

I didn't know what color to paint the walls.  I was running into the same problem I did with the playroom, which was that I wanted it to not look crazy, after all it's the bathroom guests will use, but also be fun since it's the kids' bathroom.  Again I decided to go more subtle.  I have plans to have towel hooks on the wall, so I figure their towels will bring the fun kid colors to the room.  :)  I chose an icy  blue-gray that matched the shower curtain the former owners left.  I kinda can't believe I'm keeping something decorate from them.  :)  I thought I didn't like it, but I realized that's because it clashed with the wall color.  

Here are two action shots.  This was before we figured out Luke had acid reflux and wanted to be held all the time.  You can see that I'm holding him while rolling.  Haha.  The reason we really took this picture is because the color looks so different in the two rooms!  In the front room where we have bright white lights it looks pretty blue and in the back room it looks decidedly more gray where we have standard edison bulbs.  We were both shocked at how different the light makes the color look.  Walter actually thought I'd opened a different can of paint!

I don't have "after" shots yet.  I've since painted the trim and primed the doors (Doors are not fun to paint!) and I need to fix up a few spots around the trim where the tape pulled of some paint.  Grr.  When I get those two things finished I'll probably put up another picture.

Still to do:
1.  Figure out what to do with the vanity.  The counter is yellowish and a the sink is a seashell.  A little dated…  I'd like to replace the whole thing but unless I can find something I like that fits at a couple discount places I'm going to try, I'll probably just paint it for now.  Then later we can save and put in something nicer, or shop around for a while.
2.  We need to do something with that shower, too.  It's also quite yellow, although it does match the vanity.  :)  The tub is in pretty good condition, so at some point I'd like to price out tiles.  But that's down the road.
3.  We'll also eventually do something with the floors.  The funny thing is, and I didn't realize it until we started painting, but I actually picked a color that matches the vinyl floor tiles!  They aren't the nicest, and I wish they were at least grouted, but they don't clash either.  So I'm not too worried about then more the time being.  Maybe if we get a new vanity we'll have to do them at the same time.  I dunno.
4.  This one is out of order.  I almost forgot about it.  We're going to frame the mirror.  We'll do that one sooner than later.  It shouldn't be too difficult.

Kitchen Progress, A Sneak Peek.

While I was still recovering from having Luke, Walter took on the project of the kitchen floor.  I helped some with the uncut tiles, but he finished up with the tiles that needed cutting and then did the grouting and sealing.  We decided to use laminate stick-on tiles that are groutable.  Since we want to do a full kitchen reno sometime in the future we didn't want to invest too much time or money into these floors.  But the old floors were pretty ugly, so we wanted to do something.  

Walter did a great job!  The whole room looks so much better!  We still need to finish it off with quarter-round and put up the bead-board in the kitchen, so I'll do a full before-and-after when we have that done.

Well, that didn't take long...

Compliments of Bart.

TV and the Stand

Well, that didn't take long.  Walter had agreed to build the apothecary t.v. stand I liked so much, but I knew he still didn't love it, it would take a while, and it might not be so cheap to build because it's a big piece. After looking around at our other options for a t.v. stand online a little, I decided to check Craigslist.  Craigslist is so hit or miss that I figured I'd just keep an eye on it for a while and see what I could find.  Low and behold last night I found this solid wood dresser for only $50.  I really like the details on it, especially the woven cupboards on each side.

Here it is from farther back.  Sorry so many of my pictures are bad, but I usually take them at night when the kids are in bed.  The wall color isn't very accurate in this picture and some of our work stuff is out.  I've been "kilz-ing" the hallway doors tonight.

So now I need to figure out what to do with this guy.  I'm thinking I want to paint him white.  Should I keep the top natural wood on top but restain it?  I'm not in love with the color it is now.  Should I antique it a little?  I like that look, but it's not totally my style.  But, it would probably help the details stand out, right?  Also, I was thinking I would take out the top three drawers in the middle, actually all one drawer, and make an area for our dvd player.  But now I kinda like those drawers.  But I need a spot for the dvd player, right?  What to do?  I'm thinking this is something I'll tackle once I'm back on my feet in full force after the baby is born, so I have some time to stare at the piece and mull over my options.

Progress: The Girls' Room

On to the girls' room.  Their room started out with the same green as the lr/dr and a blue accent wall, also the same color as the lr/dr.  One of the colors may have been ok for a nursery or something, but we needed to make this room girly!  Again, the walls needed a lot of spackling and caulking tlc before we could paint them.  And cleaning.  The two kids' rooms had really dirty walls.  I finally realized that what looked like blood splatters was probably kool-aid or something.  You get the idea.

We let the girls go at the walls with paint brushes.  They stuck to it long enough to paint the three pink walls with their paint brushes!

Bart really wanted to help, but he's not quite there yet.

After they did their part we finished up rolling the walls ourselves.  The big feature in the girls' room is the color blocks we did on the fourth wall.  We'd seen this in another house we looked at and they loved it.  So we took a picture so we could recreate it for them.  We started by painting the whole wall white.  Then late one night (like most nights that week before we moved in) my mom stayed and helped us tape off squares and paint the first coat of each color.  The next day the squares just needed a few touch ups.  When it was dry we pulled the tape off and had the big reveal!  We all love it!

We didn't realize how small the girls' room is.  We hadn't planned on setting their beds up as bunk beds, but once we got them in there it became painfully obvious that that's what needed to happen.  They were super-excited for bunk beds!  Rebecca was excited for the top bunk and careful Emma was perfectly happy underneath.

Here's a shot from the other direction.  You can see that even with the bunk beds, I put one of the end tables that Emma keeps her jammies in in the closet.  But now it feels plenty spacious.

This room was pretty straight-forward, although I think my mom thought we the squares wall was going to take forever.  It really wasn't bad!  Oh, we also did a quick coat of white paint inside the closet since, as with most things in the house, it was just sort of dingy in there.

Still to do:

1.  The second picture shows more than any of the other pictures I've posted the trim and door color that was used throughout the house.  I didn't think we'd have time to kilz and paint all the doors (we didn't!) before moving in.  And it'll be pretty easy to do a door or two at a time as we go.  So the bedroom and closet doors are on this list for this room.

2.  I've got a couple things for their walls that haven't been hung yet.  All in good time...

3.  I'd like to make matching bed skirts for the girls out of tulle.  I saw it on pinterest and I think they'd love the ballerina look.  Plus then they could be matching but each girl would still have her own color (pink for Rebecca and purple for Emma) on her bed.

4.  The underneath side of Rebecca's box springs are ripped.  Not very attractive.  So I need to re-cover it with fabric.  Walter had the idea to put posters up there for Emma to look at, so maybe we'll do that instead.

Progress: The Playroom

The playroom.  To review, it had painted paneling that was a weird pinky-mauvy color.  Not my style.  Also, the paneling was really dinged up, not to mention the random paintbrush strokes from when the former owners painted the wall with the window.  There was a lot of work to be done to the walls to prepare them so they'd be smooth when we painted.

Here's the other view.

I had a really hard time choosing a color for this room.  It's a playroom so my idea was to make it a fun color.  But I already had a pretty bold color in that blue that's in the lr/dr on the other side of the playroom wall.  I didn't want them to compete or for the house to start looking like a circus!  I wanted to do green, I though, so I chose tons of green paint samples and tried to figure out what to do.  I like bright colors, so the greens I liked were brighter, kelly greens.  But I had a feeling they'd be a little loud on the walls, so I'd also chosen some more subtle greens, more in the sage family.  I just couldn't decide what direction to go.  I asked my friend, Kim, over who has a degree in interior design.  She suggested I do mostly neutrals with an accent wall.  So we chose a few greens and I got small samples of them.  I still didn't love any of them.  They were actually some of the more subtle greens, but when I put them on the wall they looked a little minty!  Not what I wanted.  From there I tried different colors of paint I already had from the kitchen (that's grays) and the blue from the lr/dr.  I got the idea that I'd paint the walls a light gray that was from the same color sample as the colors I'd chosen for the kitchen, and then add green and blue stripes on top of the gray to one paneled wall.  Now that there was a plan, we could start on the room.

To give you an idea of all the spots that needed to be fixed on these walls, here's a picture of one of the walls after it was spackled and before it was painted.  It looks like a kid with chicken pox!  And when I was painting I found more spots that I'd missed, although you probably wouldn't notice them if you're hanging out in the room.  You can also see all the colors I kept putting on the wall before I figured out what I wanted to do.  In addition to the spackling and sanding, we again caulked all the trim to make it look nice.  Oh, and by this point I'd taken to using our electric sander over every wall we painted to make sure that we smoothed out not only the divets, but also the rough spots that were all over the walls.

Here's the room now.  This is definitely a "progress" shot!  There are still boxes of books to be unpacked, which are waiting on the bookshelves to be built.  Some of our toy bins haven't been found, so the toys aren't fully organized and put away like I'd like.  Plus, this room was one of the dumping rooms for stuff when we first moved in, so there's a random thing here or there that needs to find its final home.  But it's livable and somewhat put together!

Once I got the gray on the walls I really liked it.  I realized that (as everyone had been telling me!) the colors of the toy storage, etc., would bring in plenty of color.  So after my insistence on having green in there, I stuck with neutral gray.  I also found a rug, the other part of my house-warming gift from my Grandma Brooks, that I really liked.  It had the same taupey-gray that I was using in the house and some fun turquoise and green that I'd wanted to incorporate somewhere anyway.

As you can see, not exactly totally organized, but the toys are accessible and mostly put away and there's an area for the kids to play.  I really should have taken a before shot with all the boxes in there for you to really appreciate how much work it was to get to this point!  :)

Still to do in this room:
1.  Organize Walter's little office area.  Additionally, and along with the doors and inside trim of the windows, it needs to be painted white.  It's currently the pale greenish-gray that can be found on the trim throughout the house.
2.  Curtains!  I like the window treatments on the doors right now.  They're wood roman shades.  But the other windows need something eventually.
3.  I'm planning on making a foam pad to go on top of the white bench that's under the window.  That bench will also be closed in on the ends with bead board, if things go my way.
4.  I want that window area to be a reading area for the kids.  The bench already had baskets under it with books.  But on both sides of the window Walter is going to build some bookshelves that attach to the walls made out of wood pallets.  Gotta love a free project!
5.  Somewhere down the list we'll attack the fireplace.  Walter wants to head up the mantle and I'd like to whitewash the brick.  I don't want to paint it because I like the texture and warmth of the brick, but I'd like to do a little something to it to brighten it up.
6.  Oh, and obviously we need to finish moving out boxes and getting the toy bins and other junk in there set up so it's not so cluttered all the way around the room.
7.  As I find things I like for the room I'll decorate the walls.  I have no plans for that yet.  We'll see what I come up with!

Progress: Living Room/Dining Room

For a while I had the idea that I'd be posting before and after pictures.  Now that we're a month into owning and updating our home, I realize that I may never have true "after" pictures.  I've been holding off until we got this project done or that project completed.  In some cases the project is just unpacking boxes!  With that in mind, I realized I needed to do "progress" pictures.  

Let's start with the living room and dining room.  That's the space where we started working and it was the first to be fully finished.  Well, the painting was fully finished first.  Nothing in the house is fully, fully finished.

As a reminder, her are the befores.  There were things I loved and didn't love in this big room.  Although not traditional, I loved having a fan in the dining room.  It's obviously new, and as a Southern girl, I know the value of a good ceiling fan, even if every interior decorator out there might beg to differ.  I loved the chair railing in this room and the crown molding that we are lucky enough to have throughout the whole house, even the basement!  The floors, while laminate, are a pretty color and are pretty perfect for us with little kids.  Maybe someday down the road we'll put in hardwoods, but at this point they'd probably just get ruined.  So a pretty wood laminate is perfect for us.  

What I did not like about the room was the colors.  Baby blue on bottom and a yellowish, minty kind of pale green on top.  I'm also not a big fan of popcorn ceilings, although throughout the house.  While scraping the ceilings was on our original list of things to get done before we moved in, my parents convinced us to put it off for fear that they are likely asbestos ceilings.  We finally agreed.  I'm actually glad that we did because we ended up having no extra time to tackle the project that popcorn ceilings would have been.

Here's a quick shot standing in the dining room and looking into the living room and beyond that, the foyer.

Oh, and here's the cute picture of Walter and me, excited for our new house.  Now you know our secret that hidden under some blue paint is the date we bought our house, painted on the wall in the same blue paint.  :)

So here's what we ended up doing in there.  Basically, we painted!  Actually, that makes it sound a lot simpler than it was.  As I've mentioned before, the walls weren't in great shape, although this room was much better than others.  Still, we did a fair amount of spackling and sanding to smooth the walls and went over all the moldings (three sets in this room!) with caulk so that they looked seamless when painted.  This is the one room that has the window trim painted, too.  It's really not noticeable in any of the before pictures, but most of the trim in the house was a pale grayish/greenish color.  Not pretty.  And the problem was the color under that was an oil-based paint, so the grayish-greenish color (a latex-based paint) was peeling off.  As a result, we had to kilz all the trim before we put on our paint/primer combo.  These are all steps that I hadn't planned on and reasons why it's good we didn't take on those ceilings.

For this room I went with this dusty blue on top and bright white on the bottom.  I love how crisp it looks.  I had already thought that black accents would look nice in the room, so it's lucky for me that the couches and ottoman we've had for 9 years happen to be black.  We set up our kitchen table in the dining room.  We decided the kitchen would feel pretty cramped if we our table for 6 in the eat-in area. Next we set up two short bookcases (you can only see one in the picture) in the nook area of the living room where our t.v. and t.v. stand will eventually go.  We are still living in the dark ages with old-school t.v.s, so we have decided it's time to update ourselves to a flat-screen.  (Actually we bought it today for Walter's b-day!  But this picture was taken a few days ago...)  Next, my grandma offered to buy us a rug as a house-warming gift.  Within the budget she set, I found this navy and off-white rug for in here as well as a more durable rug for the playroom!  I was worried that the off-white would look dingy in the room with the bright-white on the walls, but it doesn't bother me at all.  You can see that although we cleared out the work station that was in here for a while even after we moved in, we still left out some basic tools that we're keeping in the bookcases for now so that we can have quick access to them while we work on other projects we want to complete before Luke is born.

So far I love this room.  It was the easiest one for me to choose the colors for and I'm really happy with what I chose.  Here's what we still have on our list for this room:

1.  Eventually clear out the remaining tools in the bookshelves and have something, well, prettier there. Prettier, but still baby-proof.  Ideas?  :)
2.  Curtains!  We kept the curtain rods they had up.  They were gold with white lace curtains stapled to them in swags.  I want to spray the rods black and find some slightly sheer white curtains.  I found some I like but the curtain rods are actually pretty big in diameter.  So I don't think the rings will fit on the curtain rods well.  Still working out my options on that...
3.  Get the t.v. set up and figure out what we're going to do for a t.v. stand.  I found a t.v. stand that I really like that I would love for Walter to build.  :)  It has faux apothecary drawers that would match our end tables.  Walter is definitely up for building things for our house, but I don't think he loves it as much as I do.  I think he wants something more modern.  So we'll see where things fall on this one.
4.  Get things up on the walls.  That will happen over time, I suppose.  It's going to be hard to stop working on projects after the baby is born and I need to rest for a while.  But I figure I can do a little of this during that time.  For one thing, I have a big, black frame that has spots for lots of pictures in it.  I've never filled it with pictures, so that seems like a good post-baby project for me.  :)
5.  I found some stick-on ceiling tiles that we talked about using.  They can be painted to look like tin-tiles, but I'd paint them white to match the room.  I think they'd look really nice in here and would add an architectural element.
6.  Oh yeah, we need to put the plates back on all the outlets and switches.  We would have done that already, but we'd like to replace the tan ones with white ones, which makes it a bigger project than just replacing the plates because we actually have to get a little into electrical to replace the actual switches and plugs.

I think that's it.  Well, until we find more things we want to do, of course!  :)