So instead of focusing on remodeling our main living area, we told the girls that they could paint their rooms first. My husband wanted to prep the walls first by spackling and sanding them (did I mention that he is king of the spackle?). As he began to do this, he noticed something strange. What we thought was blue paint was really thick vinyl wallpaper that had been painted over multiple times and was done throughout the bedrooms and hallway. In the picture to the right, you can see the piles of wallpaper that we pulled down and the what the wall looked like underneath (that is a stain and not mold). It was pretty gross under there.
Now instead of an easy wall prep and painting, we had to pull off the all of the wallpaper and glue in both bedrooms and the hallway, then patch all of the holes we found under the wallpaper (a few times with screen), then paint. If you look closely in the picture to the left, you can see the number of places we had to patch on just one wall. There was also rough cedar trim for the baseboard and molding at the top (you can see the dark molding in the pictures), so we pulled down all of that as well so that we could sand it and paint it.
One of the walls was also cedar that had already been painted, kind of. It was very rough and we kept catching our clothes on it every time we walked by, so we knew we had to sand and paint that wall as well.
We thought we could tackle that pretty easily still, but when we went to Lowe's to get paint for the trim, we found out that cedar trim will have tannins come through the white paint. Because of this, we had to use an oil-based primer (Zinnser Cover-Stain Primer) in order to block the tannins. That took two coats and then two coats of regular white semi-gloss paint over that.
If any of you have ever painted with oil-based paint, you know that the fumes are quite extreme. I have since found that there are low odor or odorless versions of this and I would highly recommend those. We did this over the holidays and my daughter was forced back upstairs to sleep on the couch every time we did this. Even with the windows open, the smell was quite strong.
In retrospect, we probably should have just replaced the cedar trim. It would have been a lot easier on us, but we were trying to keep the wood that was original to the house.
After we bought the house, we also discovered that the windows in the bedroom had no framing around it. You could see the outside wall and air was coming through. The hubby is awesome though and framed up the window nicely. Of course, he did it with cedar, so we had to go through the whole oil primer and paint with those as well. The daughter also decided that she wanted to have a green colored paint in her room, but we couldn't really find one that would satisfy the both of us, especially since she doesn't live here and this will mostly be a guest bedroom. We compromised and did one wall in Early Riser from Magnolia Farms by Joanna Gaines (now available from our local Ace Hardware) behind the bed and the rest was done in Vanilla Sugar from Sherwin Williams (available at Lowe's). I ended up really liking both of these and with the white trim, it looks really light and bright.
We also painted the baseboard heating. We have a boiler system that heats our home and we have baseboard heating throughout, most of which has not been painted since it was installed in 1974. However, a quick white spray paint worked wonders and brought everything back as good as new. (Note: because the boiler forces water through the base boards, they do not get that hot so we did not have to use special paint on them.)
The room still isn't done as we decided to nix the carpet and go with floors that would complement the ceiling. Because of that, we haven't put the baseboards in yet and will wait until the floors go in to do that. We will update the pictures once that goes in, but at least my girls aren't scared to sleep in their rooms any longer! More details on the other daughter's room coming soon along with better bedding as soon as we get it ordered.
