It’s not the painting that takes forever… it’s all the prep work. We have one bedroom in our basement that is going to be carpeted, so we had to do the work down there as well. I’ll try to take you through the process of that one room so you can see what we’re doing in each room.

Here’s a picture of the room post popcorn removal and smoothing. This is an arduous but considerably unphotogenic process. BTW, that crazy huge light (aka “the man light”) is by far, the single best investment we’ve made in tools (in my opinion). At least, as far as this ceiling stuff goes!

We also patch the walls and the wood trim. As you can see here, there were also approximately 823 holes in the walls. Apparently there was a bunch of stuff posted on the walls with push pins, or something. We also had to use a lot of wood putty on the trim work to fix cracks and other damage to the baseboard molding. On the crown molding, we had to fill the holes that were left by the nails in the original installation of the molding (um, wtf??) I guess we should just be happy that we have fancy molding, right? haha.

In the upstairs rooms, there is also prep work to be done on the floor. The carpets are taken out, but there are staples from the foam padding left. So, those get pulled out one by one. In this basement room, however, we just had rows of nails that went around the perimeter of the room. Those got pulled out with a pry bar and Oak filled the holes with cement patcher.

The patcher is pretty easy to apply.. just like spackle or wood putty, you smooth any holes with it. In action:

AFTER all this work is done, you can finally paint. Which we have moved on to, but I will keep you all in suspense until we can do a “final reveal” (HGTV style yo!) More soon…

Posted by Carrie on Monday, January 18, 2010
Categories: home improvement · 2 Comments »