More Wallpaper: The Living Room Saga - Part 2

Sometimes our flaws and good qualities are the same thing. For me, one of my simultaneous flaws/positives is that I can get very focused on a task and do not stop until I finish a task. That might be why several house projects have been at a standstill. During the school year I can't divert my attention from all my teaching responsibilities (lesson planning, grading, parent communication) to take time to work on something in the house while still maintaining important time for my family. Evidence of my ridiculous focus would be the time I put into working on our guest room when we first moved into the house. I stayed up late several nights in a row to get the room done. I needed to have at least one pretty room in the house, and I lost sleep making sure that happened.

So it should be no surprise that I have worked tirelessly since Sunday to FINALLY finish our living room walls. These walls have been the bane of my existence for three years, and I decided that they needed to be done before I could get anything else accomplished this summer. Our living and dining room need to look good.

Monday afternoon I started tackling the wallpaper as soon as the kids were down for naps. I refused to stop for the day until I had removed all the paper and sanded off excess from one wall. My initial thought was that if I could at least get this wall painted and finished I would feel better. Monday night I crawled into bed at 1 a.m.

The reality is that having one more nice wall wasn't enough. Tuesday morning I started by repairing the wall that was completely stripped. Then during naps (which didn't last very long) I started stripping the rest of the walls, in the process incurring one wallpaper removal injury while I was finishing the last wall.

Regardless of the injury, I would not rest until the walls were completely stripped and further wall repair was done. Tuesday night I crawled into bed at 12:50 a.m.

Wednesday morning I got up before Jeff, ate breakfast and got started on sanding down the walls that had dried from wallpaper removal the night before. Then, while trying to keep both kids out of the mess (another hazard of home improvement) I worked on the last of the wall repair. During naptime I started washing down one wall. Once both kids were awake, I got a little more done and was all set to stay up late for another night priming. Then the megastorm hit. I spent the rest of Wednesday night carefully watching the weather and waiting for a warning that would have us getting the kids out of bed and into the basement. Thankfully that warning never came.

Thursday morning was busy, but between our daughter's gymnastics lesson and swimming lesson we managed a trip to Lowes to get a can of paint so that I could paint our front door and front flower box. One project wasn't enough. I needed another project to occupy my time. Actually, my reasoning was that I couldn't get much wall painting done while the kids were awake, so instead I would do small projects while they were napping and save the wall painting for when they crashed for the night. That would have worked, except that our son took a really short nap while the window guy was here to give us an estimate on window replacement. After the window guy left, I had the kids play downstairs while I quickly painted the front door and then I took them outside to play while I painted the front flower box. They were very excited about Mommy's painting project, so I gave both of them cups of water and cheap paint brushes to "paint" the front steps while I painted the front flower box. They were thrilled and I got a coat of paint on the front flower box. Even with a single coat (and anyone who has painted red knows that red takes more than one coat no matter how good the paint) both the flower box and the front door looked significantly better.

After

Before

Before

After

There, another project started that was making me feel better about the state of the house. Thursday night we ran some quick errands and once the kids were in bed I got to work. I primed all three walls and then made the decision to paint the first coat.

Walls primed

It might have seemed a little silly at the time. It was after 10:30 when I started painting, and I didn't crawl into bed until almost 2, but I'm glad I did it. I went to bed with a coat of paint on the wall and suddenly the end was in sight.

Then we ran into a slight problem. I bought the original paint at Sears. We discovered Friday night as I was trying to get one last gallon of paint that Sears no longer carries paint. At least, our Sears no longer carries paint. It was time to test the claims of the home improvement stores' color matching services. Ironically enough I had been complaining on Thursday that I wasn't looking forward to going back to painting with a paint that wasn't paint + primer because I had discovered that the newer home improvement store paints were just better in appearance and ease of application. Now I was back to a higher quality paint. Thankfully I had purposely stopped painting at a corner, so there would be no mixing of paints. And for those of you wondering, the color matching worked! I was in bed by 12:30 Friday night, tired, but happy to be able to claim that the painting was done.

Part three will cover finishing touches, including possible discussion of our new windows. Until then I must state one more time: I HATE WALLPAPER!!!!!