Painting the Walls and Various Body Parts
Remember that house we bought? We took a break from posting about our remodeling because we were afraid of boring you with long drawn out posts about how we bought a miter saw so we could cut some new baseboard trim except when we opened the box, it turned out the saw was broken so we took it back to Lowes but they didn’t have any saws so then we borrowed one from a friend but it turned out that we had purchased the wrong size of baseboard so we took THAT back and bought the right kind and then we cut it and realized we cut it too short so we decided just to install it anyway and put a bookshelf in front of the funny-looking part.
But we thought you might enjoy a few remodeling photos. That photo at the top is the “before” picture of the front bedroom. That’s what it looked when the previous owners lived there. We really like this bedroom because it has windows facing south and east and just generally has a nice sunny, open feel. However, we weren’t too excited about the painted paneling and the boring-yet-ugly carpeting. Luckily, we checked and found out that there were beautiful hardwood floors underneath the ugly carpeting!
So we pulled down the paneling, ripped up the carpeting, and painted the plaster walls with a blue-green-gray shade of Aura paint, a low-VOC paint manufactured by Benjamin Moore. It seemed like a reasonably green option and we managed to donate the carpet to a friend who will use it to make weed-free paths through her garden. (We’re still looking for someone who wants carpet padding and old paneling.)
We made similar changes in the front family room, although I don’t have pictures of the painted version yet. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to take a few more tomorrow, and we might even have the trim up by then. (Why is it that remodeling projects always take longer than expected?)
Tomorrow our housesitting duties end and we will spend our first night in the new house. We’re excited to have it really feel like ours, although I suspect it will be awhile yet before it really feels like home. There will undoubtedly be a few more weeks of living out of boxes and making regular trips to the hardware store. But there’s something satisfying about painting your own home and getting paint in your hair and deciding not to worry about it because you’re moving straight on to mowing your lawn and then when you’re sweaty and grass-covered stepping into you shower and remembering that your water heater isn’t working all the great but thinking that it’s been a hot day of home remodeling so you’re sure an ice-cold shower will be fun and invigorating. Just don’t expect to get the paint out of your hair.
