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Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Biting off a serious mouthful: playroom update

You guys!  How the heck are you?  Hope all the mommas out there had a lovely Mother's Day :) It's been a minute, and we've gotten a TON accomplished around the house.  I'm actually typing this while sitting in the finished playroom :). So, there's lots to update you on! 

But why the delay?  Well, this playroom project was far more than we ever imagined it would be.  It's still not 100% finished!  It took for.ev.er, and I think throwing all our time and energy into it burnt us out a bit.  This was not an instant gratification thing.  In the future, I think we'll do bits and pieces of different projects and jump around a little more, just so we don't burn out.  Also, we've been potty learning with Gage, and just came off of a week of terrible twoness that you wouldn't BELIEVE!!

I've sat down to try and write this post maybe 5 times, but just couldn't do it.  I was that burnt out lol! And I just didn't feel like I could do justice to the time and effort we put in.  But after letting it be for a while, I can say it was well worth the effort.  It's a completely transformed space, and a room that is actually functional for us!  But let's get down to the nitty gritty :)

Before we could even get to those walls, there was a bit of demo that needed to happen.  The bar area and raised seating had to be torn down.



And then the flooring had to be pulled up.



How do you like my cutie little helper?!  He really enjoyed tearing things apart :) only with supervision by daddy of course!

Once we moved furniture and wood out, we were finally left with a blank-ish slate



You can see in the two above photos that we were left with tons of holes, several different paint colors, chair rail and some damage from the structures in the room.  So this was when the nightmare started.  I think I pulled 50 nails out of the walls, all different shapes and sizes.  And the caulking on the chair rail was pretty mean.  It did a fantastic job of ripping drywall paper off the walls :( Meaning we had even more areas that had to be patched.  We debated leaving the chair rail, but it was only on 1.5 of the walls, so we decided to do away with it rather than patch in new pieces.

Now, keep in mind we are by no means professionals, and there may be a much more scientific means of repairing walls.  We were actually concerned at this point that they'd never look right, and we'd have to put up all new dry wall.  But we pushed through, figuring we could always take it down if it was that bad.

The first part of the process?  Filler!  Get a tub, and start slapping it in those holes.


Everything that wasn't smooth got a coat (sometimes two) which we had to let dry.  We patched holes and rough spots over the course of ten days.  Yea, it was that bad.  And here I thought the whole thing would be finished in 2 weeks!  The DIY gods are laughing at me, I tell ya!


Once that was dry, everything had to be sanded.  Since this is a decent sized room (12'x13'), and there was SO MUCH sanding to do, Dano suggested we use the electric sander.  This was both awesome and awful at the same time.  I think we would have spent a solid month just sanding if we did it by hand, so the time saving factor was huge!  But the dust.  Oh man, the dust.  Ev.er.y.where!! We shut the door, and went to town.  And it looked like we had dusted the house with cocaine!  And every time someone walked from the playroom to another part of the house, they tracked white footprints!  Just when I think I've wiped every surface, I find it lingering somewhere else.  Enter more cackling from the DIY gods.

Since we have the distinct pleasure of having textured walls (sarcasm, anyone?) we knew all these smooth surfaces would need to have some sort of texture put back on them, so they'd blend into the rest of the wall.  We watched some tutorials, and debated different methods, but couldn't pick a direction.  Then, while perusing Lowes one day, we came across this:


The DIY gods threw us a bone!  This stuff was the bomb dot com!  It comes in several different textures, and it's just like using spray paint!



Spray it on your smoothed areas, feathering out into your already textured wall, let it dry and boom!  You are ready to prime!


A coat of primer (a couple areas with darker paint got two coats) and two coats of Sherwin Williams Rainwashed left us with this:


Like a breath of fresh air!  It's light and pretty, and really opens up the space :). The walls aren't perfect.  But they are 95% better than what we started with! and we were able to repair them very inexpensively.  Sometimes it was hard to see the finish line, but I'm so glad we reached it!  

Oh and that picture gives you a sneak peek of the floors, which I'm super excited about!  Can't wait to share with you!





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