The Living Room Repaint

The temple was closed for 2 weeks in May, so my in-laws had a lot of time off. After spending the first part of the time in Oregon visiting my MIL's sister, they had a few extra days to spend in Glendale. They are usually only here on Mondays, so we decided we had enough time to take on a bigger project. We decided to paint the living room. There are so many more important things to be done in the house, like getting their part of the house liveable, but we decided to just quickly throw up some paint to make the room feel cleaner. (There were dirt marks on the wall outlining where the old owners' pictures had been, it was pretty gross.) The walls in this house have gobs of texturing on them that drive me crazy. I wanted to smooth it out somehow, but we figured we didn't have enough time for such a huge project, we would do that later. So Dick started repairing the collapsing ceiling and the huge whole in the wall where the heater used to be, and Linda started cleaning the walls. As she was cleaning, she noticed that the old paint was washing right off. I guess that meant that the previous paint job wasn't that good. Then we noticed that if we sprayed just a little bit of water on the wall, all the texturing would peel right off with a hand scrapper. So even though it meant not finishing the project in the next couple of days, we decided it would be easier to take the texturing off now, then to paint it the correct way and then have to figure out a way to smooth the walls later. So we spent all day Thursday scrapping. My hand was like frozen in the shape of the scrapper handle, I had scrapped for about 8 hours straight. Linda scrapped and cleaned window molding. I wish I had taken a picture of us completely covered in paint and wall mud, but no one was ever clean enough to grab the camera! Even though the walls were scrapped down to the wall board, it already felt so much better in the room. The next day, Dick spent some time patching holes and finishing up the prep work, while Linda taped the trim. Saturday they painted the ceiling, molding on the windows, and the fireplace. Then they had to leave. Over the next two weeks, Dick returned when he could to finish painting the rest of the room, replacing switches, plugs and light fixtures, and other little nick nacky things that still needed to be down. There is still a lot of remodeling type stuff we want to do in there, but it is so great to just have the room feel clean and bright, and especially to get rid of that terrible panelled wall and fireplace. Thanks Dick and Linda for everything!!! I say "we" did it, but I only worked on Thursday, they did the rest!

BEFORE-these pics were taken in October, just after we moved in.

fireplace and panelled wall

Old heater hole in the wall. (can you tell where the old owners had hung their pictures above the heater?)

looking into the dinning room

Entry way (are you loving the blue blinds?)

DURING

I wish I had taken a picture of the ceiling before Dick started fixing it, it looked really bad

patched hole and scrapped walls

Window wall

Entry way


This is a good picture of the texturing on the walls. We didn't bother taking it off of the ceilings. You can also see the area of the ceiling that had been patched before we moved in. It was pretty obvious where the patch was.

TRIM & CEILING Painted

I love the white fireplace!

Can't even tell the ceiling had any problems, Dick is amazing!

What a difference freshly painted floor boards make. This is the only part of the house that actually HAS floor boards! Some day, floorboards and crown molding.

Those are the flowers Grant and the kids got me for Mother's Day!

AFTER

Entry way- new switches, mailbox cover still needs to be painted and put back on.

Hole in the wall? What hole in the wall?! Someday we'll get the door painted. There just wasn't enough time.

Entry way (I wish I had taken a picture of the light fixture in here, it was horrendous.)


My beautiful fireplace (we will eventually get a new cover or paint it silver. It turns out the color I chose for the walls is almost exactly the same as the color that was already in the house, but it just feels so much brighter.)

If you look closely, you can see that Troy has already left some art work on the freshly painted walls. We currently don't have any blinds on these windows, but no blinds are better than those blue things!