Renovation Junkie

I am literally DYING to pull all of my carpet out of my house and put in hardwood floors or just live on bare cement until I can afford hardwood floors.

Every day I long to rip out my kitchen cabinets, re-purpose the laundry room and totally gut the master bath.

When I am not thinking about the inside of of my house I am fixated on my lawn, the landscape, a new deck, and a flagstone walkway and firepit.

I have big dreams and ZERO budget and so I do the small projects I can and hope for is to do some small painting projects to soothe my restoration itch.

Last week I started to paint the master bedroom after scraping the ceilings twice, painting them with primer, then doing another light texture, another coat of primer and then finally painting them with a gallon of Behr Pure Premium Paint with Primer added in. Color choice? Bleached Linen. Wall Color? Oven Straw on 3 Walls and Macchiato on an accent wall. Problems? Multiple.

When I first scraped the ceilings I thought I would leave it lightly textured by just scraping it lightly. This is still extremely time consuming and messy. Then I started to paint the freshly scraped ceiling and it looked too gritty and so I used water and a slower scraping technique to remove every ounce of plaster down to the bare sheetrock. This is easily done if you use lots of water, time and elbow grease.

I rolled on the texture after the scraping which is necessary to hide the small gouges and nail holes that I had exposed from all the scraping, but before that I applied a layer of Primer because I thought I might just prime it and paint the ceiling and call it a day, but after priming it I realized it needed to be textured.

After I finished with the ceiling I tackled three walls at once and when it came to the cut-in around the top of the ceiling – the hardest part of the job – I realized only after I was finished that I had a paint that was the wrong color. It was so very close in color, but definitely a shade darker than the oven straw that I was using. Ugh.

I also removed the ceiling fan and bought a new one and in the end this simple paint project has cost me about $500 dollars and I didn’t even get around to the Master Bath which was also on my list for this project.

During this whole ordeal I have been sleeping on the couch and it has caused my whole house to turn into a construction zone that is quite the messy nightmare. I plan to remedy this problem today with a final painting of the master bedroom and then I am going to put my bed back in there and at least get some good sleep.