I’m really late with this post for week 5 of the One Room Challenge. My apologies, but time is just meaningless at this point. How do people do the ORC and not want to die or kill people? Am I too old for this? I feel like I’m having an existential crisis. (Oh, if only I had the time.)
Okay, as we left things last week, I was removing wallpaper. Yeah, that didn’t go well at all. I had the stupid optimistic view that it wasn’t that hard to remove in this room—I just gave up last time because it was the last room we were tackling and I had no more fucks to give. But no. That shit is SO STUCK to the wall it’s not funny. I spent four hours and only managed to remove about eight square feet of paper. At that rate it would take me two weeks to remove it all.
The Man of Action had been advocating all along to just stick the new wallpaper over the old, but I am a purist and insisted we do it the *right way.* After those four hours though, I was completely on board with his genius plan. That old stuff is not coming down. I’m choosing to think of it as lining paper. We did go around and scrape it all really good though. There are actually two coats of paper there. The first layer is what we assume is the original wallpaper from when the house was built in 1923. It looks like maybe a bamboo pattern. I don’t know, it’s hard to tell because the second layer of red and green 1980s stuff is papered on with a coat of glue that is SO THICK. When we moved in there was a top layer (the third layer) of really ugly white wallpaper that we were able to just peel off right away.
I think the previous owners had a roof leak in one corner at one point in the past, so that paper wasn’t sticking to the wall anymore. This was located on the wall that the closet is behind and we found water damage to the wood floor on that corresponding closet corner. This is the corner and what I always assumed was an uncaulked hole above the molding. It always freaked me out because it looked like a centipede if you saw it out of your peripheral vision.
But no, that’s not a hole. It’s mold. And I think we discovered why the previous owners had painted over this wood crown molding, but not the other wood molding in the room. Awesome.
Anyway we made that decision to not take down the old wallpaper and I moved onto the painting of the wood trim. My brilliant plan there was to spray it all, rather than painting with a brush. I thought this would speed things up. Because big DIY blogs I follow said so. And apparently I am gullible.
My reasoning was that all the prep work I had to do—cleaning with TSP (substitute), deglossing, taping the windows—were all things I had to do no matter how I painted. And I didn’t need to worry about overspray because we would be wallpapering after the painting. I could remove all the doors and hardware and zip right through spraying the primer and two coats of paint. The doors and windows I could paint in the yard.
First thing wrong with that is the weather did not cooperate. It was so rainy every day. That made taking the doors and windows outside impossible. Plus, the Man of Action reminded me that on more than one occasion we have removed doors in this house (mostly to strip globby paint off of them) and had a devil of a time getting them back up. Something about gravity and hinges compressing and yada, yada, yada. He insisted a long time ago that we stop doing that.
We decided to just take the windows out—they are what I was worried about the most. When I painted the closet window it got stuck shut even though I tried to be really careful to not glob paint in the seams. We got it back open, but it was a fight. I didn’t want to do that with the windows in the parlor because I need them to open easily in the summer.
We never open the front French doors. Okay, we opened them twice. In the 18 years we’ve lived here. Once when we first moved in to see if we could. (The previous owners had nailed and painted most windows closed. They were old and afraid of the neighborhood.) And then once three weeks ago to clean the cobwebs. I don’t care if they get painted shut. That probably disqualifies me as a responsible home design blogger, but who cares. I just started this five weeks ago. Disqualify me! I don’t care.
It took me one whole evening to clean all the wood carefully. And then another evening and early morning to thoroughly degloss the wood. I did two passes on that. Then another super long evening to tape all windows and hardware and the floor. Another two evenings to figure out how to tape the open window wells, the closet door, and the wide pocket door opening between the living room and parlor. That last one was challenging because half of the woodwork was getting painted and getting a clean demarcation line was not easy. The Man of Action helped by taping off the freshly painted ceiling for me one morning.
THEN I started to spray the Stix primer. It went okay. Not as fast as I thought. And complicated because all windows were taped and it was hot here all of sudden and I stopped wearing contact lenses a few years ago and my glasses kept getting fogged up from the mask I was wearing to keep from breathing paint. It was not easy either, so many different angles to spray and it took me about five hours to do a thorough coat.
I was still on board with the plan at that point though. It wasn’t until I started spraying the first coat of paint that things turned into a nightmare. That paint is so much heavier than the primer and I COULD NOT SEE WHAT I WAS DOING IN THAT ROOM once the paint started spraying. Fogging glasses, no ventilation, paint clouds all around me. I thought I was going to die. And it took me almost seven hours to get a good solid coat.
THAT IS NOT EASIER THAN PAINTING WITH A BRUSH. I’m sorry, but no. My arms hurt from holding the sprayer out as far from my face as I could while still holding it steady to get a good coat. I might just be feeble and old, but I don’t think so. I hand painted the second coat with a brush and roller. And despite wearing a mask during the spraying, I’m still coughing up blue paint. ALSO? Despite the sheets of plastic coating all doorways and the paper taped 18 inches out on the ceiling, overspray got everywhere. Not direct overspray, but that cloud of paint I couldn’t see through had to land somewhere. Other than on me and inside my lungs. (The Man of Action said I looked like a Smurf after spraying.) It covered the drop cloth on the floor, but that was expected, that’s why the I covered the floor. But it leaked into the closet onto the new storage furniture somehow. (It coated all of it in a fine layer of blue dust—that wiped away easily, but still.) Also out into the first few feet of the living room. And onto the ceiling in a super light haze that really only showed once we took down the tape and paper.
The good news, if there is any, is that I wasn’t liking the Benjamin Moore Pale Oak I painted on the ceiling. And now that I had to repaint the parts that had over spray, I just decided to repaint the whole thing a new, darker color. Because I HAVE ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD. Right? I didn’t want to wallpaper and then decide to repaint, so I went for it and I’m really happy with the new color. Willow Creek. You can see it above. (Incidentally, Willow Creek is the name of a road that lead into the neighborhood where I grew up. Seemed serendipitous.)
I don’t have great pictures of the nonsense of the last week because after I taped the plastic up in the closet doorway, I realized I left my camera in a drawer in the closet. (It was in a case inside a closed drawer, so luckily paint mist did not get on it.) If that doesn’t encapsulate the whole futility of the last week, I do not know what does. Please enjoy some bad camera phone pics of the painted woodwork, and a sneak peak of the wallpaper up above.
Will I live to see the end of this challenge? Check back next week to see. I feel like it could either way at this point.
