So Long, Tan Paint!

FINALLY. You guys, I am SO excited about this: our bedroom isn't tan any more!  And now that it's finally put back together, I can show you how that all went down.

We really started the process last Thursday, when I taped off the trim and patched up some holes and cracks in the wall.

This turned out to be a mistake. We were planning to paint the trim, too, and if we'd been thinking, we'd have painted it first, and THEN taped it off. That would have made our (well, my) life much easier down the road, because trim has some really tiny, narrow areas that need to be painted, and it would have been nice to paint it without having to worry so much about getting paint on the rest of the walls. It wound up taking me every night for a week to paint all the trim.  So, for next time: trim first.

Friday involved finishing the trim and moving all the furniture out of the room so we could start painting on Saturday morning. This also meant that we had to find a home for our bed, which is not exactly small! After some deliberation, we wound up moving the mattress (and only the mattress) to the living room. We figured it wouldn't be a big deal for a couple of nights... and it wound up down there for a week. Heh. Whoops.

Saturday actually went really well. We decided to get started on the ceiling first, so Troy did the big stuff and I worked around the edges to fill in where his roller couldn't reach. Thomas came over to help after a little while, which was fantastic, and between the three of us we managed to get two coats of paint on the ceiling and the dark green accent wall, and one coat on the light green walls. It went so well, in fact, that I forgot to take a single picture all day.  But - it was good. We went to bed pretty optimistic about finishing on Sunday.

Sunday morning we saw why that wasn't going to work.

Oh. Boo.

Tape fail!

It turns out that our taping job was not as good as we'd hoped, and that the fancy edger tool that we bought hadn't been too successful at keeping paint from leaking under the tape, either. Our walls are pretty heavily textured, which means that anywhere the tape didn't make it all the way into one of the textured dips, the paint did, and welled up in there. Which meant I was going to be spending my day fixing what we'd messed up the day before, while Troy put the second coat on the light green walls and finished the edge work. It was a long, frustrating day.

I finished fixing the ceiling, thankfully, but it wasn't until Monday evening that I could start painting the trim. We developed a pretty good system for getting to the bulk of it.  We took a long putty knife and used it to shove the drop cloth under the trim to protect the carpet and get it out of the way. Then we painted with a small trim roller while the putty knife was still there, to keep the carpet and the drop cloth out of the paint.

That worked really well for everything except that little ledge where the trim meets the wall. That part had to be done with a paintbrush. We'd already seen what would happen if we just taped it, so instead I took a craft paintbrush and did it by hand, around the whole room.

It took me the better part of the week to finish that part. SO FRUSTRATING.

Troy took the time to do awesome things like spray paint our light fixture and the outlet and switch plates with oil-rubbed bronze, which turned out absolutely beautiful: 

Okay, the flowers aren't my favorite ever, but they're pretty hard to see unless you're this close.

And hang the curtain rods more intelligently than we did last time.

Using painter's tape to mark where the holes go = brilliant!

Some day we are going to replace those ugly Wal-Mart curtains.

When I finally got done with the trim, I hung the plaques back on the wall above where the bed would go.

Our walls are shiny. Sorry.

And finally, on Friday night, we were ready to pull up the drop cloths, clear the room, and vacuum.

Puggles love freshly vacuumed carpets.

And then - finally - we could start moving furniture back in. Finally. I was SO ready to be done sleeping on the living room floor.

By this point, were were pooped (to say the least!) so the rest had to wait for Saturday. That included mounting the TV to the wall across from the bed:

At least painter's tape is good for something!

We hadn't put the doors back on the bathroom or the closet yet.

And then it was just down to putting things back together and making it look like a useful room again.

Now that the doors are back on, it's a fully functional room once more! Which makes me pretty darn happy.

Haven't figured out yet how to keep the flash from blinding off the mirror.

There are still a couple things I'd like to do, and they are both visible in this picture.

They are:

1. We need to find a different/smaller/better laundry basket for jeans. They don't fit well in our awesome laundry sorter, but we haven't figured out yet where they are going to live long-term.
2. That mirror. It was a cheap Wal-Mart purchase, and it fell off the closet door a long time ago. But we don't have a replacement yet, and I need something, so it stays until we figure out what to get.
3. Ugly cords. We're discussing ways to hide those or make them less ugly, we just haven't settled on anything yet.

Personally, I would love to get one of those tall, free-standing mirrors like this one, or this one, or this one. But those are pricey, and our bedroom budget is wiped out for now, so we'll have to wait.  Still, what good is it if we don't have something to look forward to?

The next stop, though, will be the kitchen. It's time to take some ugly house paint off some cabinets!