Meg vs. The Living Room: More Stinking Paint!

Thursday: Get paint samples for bedrooms and bathrooms. Scrape damaged paint from living room windows, then prime and paint.

I have to say, I am seriously tired of painting, and I still have about 80% of the house left to go. Blegh. Okay, the complaining is out of my system now.

We painted up our samples in our bedroom last night. We decided we would pick the color for our room, use that same color for the other bedrooms, then get the next darker coordinating color for our bathroom. We are holding off on picking paint for the kids' bathroom until we decide for sure on tile. Here are the samples:

Sorry for the horrible pictures! We chose the one on the left as a safer bet. The one on the right seemed a little dark and almost had a purple tinge to it. The last thing we want is to end up with all purple bedrooms! I am excited for clean, fresh walls if not for actually doing the job.

This afternoon during nap time I got to work on the front windows.

There were two places where the paint was bubbling up, and we were worried about water damage, so I scraped those spots off and took a look: no discernible damage. Yay! I started sanding a bit and was going to go at it with the electric sander to even things out again, when my common-sense alert kicked in: "This is a window on an old house! It isn't unlikely that one of these paint layers has lead! You are pregnant and have two kiddos! What are you doing?"

At this point I did what any experienced homeowner would do: I called my mom. "So, Mom, I think there's a good chance that the place I scraped has lead paint. So I think I should just stop right there and paint back over it."  "Yeah, I think you should do that."

So that's what I did. One coat of primer this afternoon, one coat of paint tonight, and another to come before the end of the week. It doesn't look too pretty, but not much worse than the big, bulging, chipping mess that was there before. Maybe sometime I'll have someone else deal with fixing it when the kiddos and me will not be near the premises. I also spent some time touching up all of the trim around the windows. Close inspection revealed that it was in dire need.

Ah, the perilous adventures of scatterbrained me trying to fix our old house!

Meg vs. The Living Room: Touch-up paint and painted shelves

Monday: Sand, fill, and paint shelves for the living room.


I tried to start on the shelves during "nap time," but my kids didn't cooperate with my well-laid plans, so I quickly filled a couple of holes and then ran back inside to the child presently making a ruckus.

Instead I decided to start on Wednesday's goal of touching up the paint, since it was mostly in places out of little ones' reach and was something I could do while watching the boys, and also do in little spurts without too much consequence on the results. But once the perfectionist goggles were on, the places I wanted to fix just kept popping up. There were a lot of places where the molding wasn't really straight, so the straight tape lines actually left little gaps in between the paint and the molding. You really can't tell much of a difference here, but it was just noticeable to be really annoying. Finally at just before 11pm I finally decided it was good enough.

All touched up and ready for shelves!

After a glass of water and an ice cream sundae, I forced myself out to the garage to squeeze in as much work on the shelves as I could manage before I collapsed in exhaustion. I finished a little sanding, wiped them down, and slapped a coat of paint on each one. Now two shelves have one coat and one shelf has two. They'll all need another coat or two tomorrow, but I will call today's mission accomplished.

I am already behind on tomorrow's goal because even though we put the can out at 6:30 a.m., apparently we missed the green waste truck. I am seriously tempted to ask my neighbors if I can borrow theirs, because not a single other person has had theirs out in the last few weeks. Alas, I feel too guilty making that my first real acquaintance with these people... Here's to another week with the giant tree branch in our driveway!

Meg vs. The Dining Room: painting the walls

Wednesday:  Paint dining room walls.


I won't say what time I finished this, but it is done.


Remember this picture from when we first moved in?

Well, here we are now.

Hello, blank slate!


There are still many, many spots I need to go back and touch up with a little brush, but overall I would say it looks 100 times better than it did before! No more dirty walls, no more green slathered on the crown molding. Now I can actually start decorating!

Meg vs. The Dining Room: more trim paint

Tuesday:  2nd coat of paint on wainscoting, dining room trim, and shelves if needed.

I realized this is a day late. But I guess it's appropriate because technically I finished this one very early this morning... I just couldn't get painting during the day with the boys running around and not enough time to dry during nap time. But I forced myself to stay up until it was done, and I'm glad!

There really isn't anything to see in this picture, except maybe why it took me so much time to do the trim; so many doors and molding! It got painstaking after a while.


I realized I needed to leave a day for the paint to dry before I start taping, so there will be some goal switching going on. And I still have only put one coat of paint on one out of three shelves, but I'll give myself until Saturday to get those painted and on the wall. Phew.

Meg vs. The Living and Dining Rooms: more painting

Monday:  Touch up trim in the living room, 1st coat of paint on wainscoting and dining room trim. Paint new shelves.

I was awakened this morning at 5:30 a.m. by an earthquake rattling our closet doors, and decided I might as well get going since painting and toddlers don't mix very well. I quickly decided that I was incredibly over-zealous with today's goal; I should have given myself a day of cleaning and prep and then split the living and dining room into two days. But I also quickly decided that I really didn't want to pull all this stuff out again tomorrow, especially because I remembered I had volunteered to have people over in the morning. So I might as well try to shove as much in as possible today.

I was painting pretty much every minute I could, and the boys were a bit impatient with my ignoring them the whole day. It's nice that I can watch them in the playroom and in the backyard from my vantage point standing on a chair in the dining room; it made the morning slightly more tolerable for everyone. I had to take the afternoon off and take the boys for a walk because they were losing it by then, so I resumed again after they went to bed. I ended up finishing the living room trim, both coats on the wainscoting, and a first coat on all the dining room trim, but didn't get to the shelves. I feel like with the living room out of the picture, tomorrow will be more manageable. Pictures to come!

Meg vs. the Living Room: Painting Update

I realized that I never posted a picture of the finished living room! Surprisingly, the green was well-covered after one coat. Totally worth the extra money for the Behr 2-in-1 paint primer stuff. We are really pleased with the results.

Sadly, there are tons of cracks that need addressing because the previous owners did a terrible patch job, so we'll be doing lots of touching up, but for now at least I can start decorating with our new color scheme. More pictures to come!

Meg & John vs. The Living Room: Painting!

I spent the bulk of last week doing painting prep, and and we FINALLY started the real painting tonight! Here was our pre-painting checklist:

• Take down the shelves with the ugly brackets.
• Scrub the molding, trim, baseboards, and wainscoting.
• Patch the multitude of holes all over the walls, the molding, and the trim.
• Sand the molding, trim, baseboards, and wainscoting.
• Tape around the baseboards.
• Paint the molding, trim, and baseboards. Let dry.
• Tape around the molding.
• Take the blades off the ceiling fan, then tape a cover over it.
• Move out all the furniture.
• Tarp over the floor.

Again, if you don't have two toddlers at home, this probably wouldn't take you a full week. If you do or have had toddlers, you will understand that I'm proud of myself just for having done this and fed them last week.

John helped me tonight since I knew I would need help with the ceiling, and I wanted to be sure to get that done before our furniture came (though it should have been here weeks ago, and still no sign of it, so we may have plenty of time left!). Here's tonight's handiwork:

Now I can take the walls one at a time. I am kind of missing the green already even though it's still on all of the walls in the majority of the house. But it was time to move on.

And I'll end with a quick tip. If you dislike washing paint brushes and pads and rollers as much as I do, you'll like this tip:  Don't wash them.

If you're going to use them again soon (within a day or so), stick them in a plastic bag. They'll be fine tomorrow. If it is going to be a few days or more between uses, stick them in the freezer, then defrost an hour or two before using again. We've been doing it for years in my family (a whole legacy of short-cutting!) and it has worked fine for our amateur efforts.

Happy painting!

Meg vs. The Walls: Painting Prep

The last few days I have been working on getting our living room prepped for painting. Our furniture is supposed to come in at the end of the week, and I thought I should at least get the ceiling done before they get here. Here is how the process has gone so far:

Monday: get all excited about painting and buy all the stuff. Put samples up on the wall. Start getting prepped. Go to bed happy.

Tuesday: start filling in holes. Caulk all around the molding. Take down the junky shelves and patch giant holes left behind. 11pm - A little excited, mostly tired.

Wednesday: Sanding. Everything in the world starts annoying me. House looks like a bomb dropped. Whiny children make me feel like my head will literally explode. I need a break. Waste time online, still nowhere near being ready to start painting. The samples on the wall are taunting me.

Tell me I'm not the only person who does this.

Oh, and also still can't find camera charger. I think I shall take a nap and hope that when I wake up, I am excited again.