The Painting Never Ends, and Baby Room Prep Finally Begins

Clearing out the baby room and figuring out where everything would go (mainly onto the guest bed) along with little improvements here and there before our new addition arrived was now the top priority. While Bea was still looking for good quality used baby furniture at a good price I was continuing the painting of the main living area and kitchen. We decided that the walls would be a nice off white color with a nice grey trim. Off to Lowe’s we went to get a five gallon bucket of the paint, along with a lot of primer, so the work could begin. The tans walls were just soaking up the primer so two to three coats on each wall was mandatory. With just the primer on the walls the house was already brighter and more welcoming.

Our vision for the new house was finally coming along and it was only January. But there was so much more that needed to be done. All of the plugs in the house were completely worn on. Anything that you would plug into them would just fall out of it, and that’s quite the fire hazard. So has the walls were being painted as a finishing touch I was replacing those plugs with new outlets and new cover plates. Adding that clean white look we were looking for.

The walls, now all painted and looking way better I started working on the little niche half wall that separated the kitchen and living room. The previous owners had used this feature to hold their television and audio equipment. This meant that there was quite a few good sized holes that would need to be filled in so I could prime and paint it. I had used patches to fill in holes left behind by the old outdated security system, but never in such a tight area. It took me several days to figure out the patch placement and how to get the mud and putty knife into the corners so it would at least look decent once it was painted. We thought about tearing it down and opening up the room more, but the thought of having to work around all of that electrical and gas lines did not sound fun to me.

Not only did I have to get into the tight corners. I also had to add the texturing to the wall as well. This house has thick texturing on every wall and ceiling and it was very difficult to replicate. I don’t know if you have ever used a texture spray can before but the settings are pretty delicate and it goes everywhere. The directions also say to spray from multiple directions and make sure you are not going in any sort of pattern. It’s kinda hard to do that when the surface you need to spray is in an area I could barely fit into.

But in the end I was able to get the holes fills and the texture just right enough for the primer and paint to finally go onto the wall. And man what a difference did it make. This ugly half wall, while still ugly, blended in so much better and at least in my opinion wasn’t as much of an eyesore as it was when we first moved in.

The walls and ceiling have all been painted and it was now time to start on the interior doors and trim. The color we chose was a medium grey color, and the color I bought, was not. But I didn’t know that at first, Bea noticed it was the wrong color after a few doors had already been painted and hung back up. Mistakes happen, and luckily this was a good mistake because the color was still a nice one and it fit in well with our color schemes. After the doors were sanded down, holes filled, and the surface was prepped the weeks it took to paint them all was finally over. And they turned out great, now the only issue was some of them were not screwing back in very well with the new oiled brass hinges I bought from amazon. The old holes were worn out and didn’t really hold the screws in place. But that was going to be an issue for another day.

The living room area and kitchen walls were now done, all that was left was the rest of the trim throughout the house. It was now time to start on the babies room. After a few weeks of searching for the perfect color, one of my friends re-painted his game room the perfect blue. So after talking with his wife we got the color now and went to local Lowe’s and the new project finally began. All of the bedrooms in the house were all painted the same gross smokers yellow, ceilings included. Another ceiling painted, and the walls weren’t dark so I could just apply the new colors. One wall was going to be a deep blue, while the others were going to be a very very light grey. I bought a gallon of the blue and a gallon of the grey. The one single blue wall took almost the entire gallon of paint. I’m not sure if it was the color or the wall but it took four coats to finally get the paint to cover the entire wall. I also painted the inside of the closet to match the walls, not sure if it was necessary but it seemed like the right thing to do. The other three walls only took two coats and man did it make the room look so much better. Meaning that the other guest room is going to be painted eventually, we didn’t want to, but the smokers yellow is just an awful color.

We also decided on a theme for the room…Harry Potter. So around where the crib would be we were going to draw a silhouette of Hogwarts with gold circles creating the outline of the castle. Bea found the silhouette on Instagram from a lady that free handed the castle. Well we are no artists, so I went to amazon and bought the cheapest projector I could buy so we could project the image onto the wall and outline the castle in painters tape. Outlining the castle was a little harder than we had originally thought, but we got it done. Back to Lowe’s we went and for what ever reason I bought an entire gallon of gold paint that we had barely used. We also picked up a few other gold colors, but this time in sample sizes. With all of the paint on hand we waited for Amazon to deliver the circle painting sponges so the real work could begin. They arrived and off we went, following the outline hoping that it was going to come out half as good as the picture we went off of.

In the end I think we did a pretty awesome job, even the original artist commented on the picture and said so. Needless to say we were pretty happy.

Below are links to some of the products I used.

Oil bronzed door hinges – https://amzn.to/34H6KLr

Bronzed door stoppers – https://amzn.to/34I1eYY

Bronze door handle without lock – https://amzn.to/2WMzmOM

Bronze door handle with lock – https://amzn.to/3nU2MXy