BEDtime

After numerous setbacks, we were finally able to get the bed in both our room and Micah's room. It had been over 2 months since we had last slept in our own bed, and over a month since we had slept in any real bed at all. It was amazing!

As expected (or hoped), Micah slept like a baby in his new bed! It took a little getting used to, but he loves it now!

Spare Room

All 3 bedrooms needed the floor refinished. So after some initial work, we got started on sanding the spare room's floor first.

We're still not too sure what the marking in the middle of the room is, but it appeared on all 3 floors. We rented a floor sander to get the bulk of the work done.

It took a bit longer than expected, but eventually the room was done. While Jason continued working on the next room, my dad began to stain this room, just to see what the color would look like.

It wasn't exactly the color that I was looking for, and I hoped it would look a little "cleaner." Without sanding inbetween coats (the jury was out on whether it was worth it or not), Jason began to stain the floor for the second time. Since he had been working on his hands and knees hand sanding the other floors, I decided to give him a break. He discovered that if you wipe the stain clean after application (you know, what you're supposed to do), it wiped almost all of the stain off. So we decided just to clean it off the with paint brush. We're still not sure if this was a terrible or great decision. I'm not sure we care. When it was done, the finish looked a ton better, but when it dried, the red mahogany was comically red in the light.

The picture shows how "clean" it appeared, but you can't appreciate the scary shade of red that appeared. After a few more days, the color started to grow on us though, and by that point, we were sick of sanding and staining, so we made the jump ahead to seal the floors. 

After the first coat of polyurethane, we loved the finish on the floors. I think this is what inspired us to do more with the room than originally planned.

We originally were going to make the spare room neutral. In fact, we were going to use the same paint color as the living room/entrance/stairs/hallway. After all of the work we've put into the house, I decided that "neutral" just wasn't going to cut it any more. This was going to be my work space in addition to a spare bedroom. I wanted it to be fun and funky, and I didn't care if it wasn't the most inviting for those very rare overnight guests that frequent our establishment.

I quickly decided that I wanted a shade of yellow. It brightens my mood and cheers me up, so I thought it would be the perfect color. (Web Reference to Color Psychology) I was trying to find a way to incorporate the brown that was used on the upper trim with the red shag rug that used to be in our living room with a shade of yellow that fit both of them. It was a painful and fruitless cause that ended with the realization that the gross shag rug (I swear, you canNOT keep it clean) was going to get a new home in the attic. This opened up my options greatly. Jason brought back some design idea cards from Lowes, and I quickly fell in love with this one. I loved how the colors worked together, and I wanted to figure out a way to incorporate them into the room.

Jason had to patch a few spots on the wall and ceiling in the room, and once they were ready, we primed and painted them. After yelling at Jason (sorry again, hun) for not painting where I asked, he informed me that he did indeed paint over the spots that were primed. This is when we realized that the ceiling paint we bought was dramatically different than the old color. And now, we had to paint the entire ceiling. Ugh.

Another valuable lesson was learned during this task. First of all, painting a ceiling is a ton more difficult than it looks. I thought, "okay, it's a wall above your head." Not so much. There are all kinds of waves and bends that make painting a complete pain! I had to take a break, because Micah and I were hungry, and I was losing my mind. The next lesson that I learned was, once you start painting something, leave it alone until it has completely dried. I tried coming back later that night to finish the job, and part of the paint had started to dry in the pan, and it was leaving streaks of dried paint, and I accidentally went over a slightly wet spot on the ceiling and the whole thing turned into cottage cheese. Well, shoot.

To make matters worse, I took that putty knife back out the next morning and tried to pick away at the excess paint chunks. Now there are holes in the ceiling. It will stay that way, because I have retired my ceiling painting skills for everyone's benefit. Seriously. Who looks up at the ceiling anyway? Stop looking.

I couldn't figure out how to work in the molding that went around the top of the wall, and on a whim, I grabbed the pry bar and tried yanking a section off of the wall. The wall was dirty under it, but it looked like it could work. The next day, I yanked out all sections of the molding in hopes of putting it at the top of the wall as crown molding. This was going to be awesome! As I was making the decisions about what colors would go on what parts of the room, I started to realize that my crown molding idea was a big flop. The molding was level with the top of the windows and door frame, which means, there were multiple sections of the room that would not have trim. It was a sad discovery, but I'm glad I realized this before I painted any of it.

Once the trim was gone, I used a putty knife to scrape the excess paint build up off of the walls. The nail holes and some cracks needed some spackle, so I filled them in. Once that was dry, I primed all of the previous trim, making sure to go over all of the brown that marked around the former trim. I later realized that I should have washed the walls before priming them. I had done a quick wash once the floors were done, just to get rid of the sawdust, but there was some gross-ness that built up under the one wall's trim from a former leak in the attic. As I was painting, it turned the white primer into grey primer. Oops.

When the primer dried, I started cutting the grey parts of the room. This included the baseboards, part of the door, one window and one wall. That took a lot longer than expected, and even though it was getting late, I was determined to get more work done. I knew that in order to get a finished look by the next day, I would have to add the black wherever I could. So I painted the window on the future yellow wall and the cut-outs on the door (both sides). At that point, I called it a day.

The next chance that I had to get painting, I moved right into touching up the previous black parts in addition to painting the second window (on the grey wall). I decided to try this window a little differently since the first one turned out so poorly. In order to get a clean line and not screw up the plastic part of the window, I did use a painter's tape on the inside of the window. My experience with painter's tape has not gone well, and in addition to occasional (paint) bleeding, it also rips off my previous or current paint color. The point of using this tape around an edge is so that your hand doesn't have to be exact. When the freaking tape rips off the old paint, then you have the exact same problem all over again, just with a different color and a nice little hole in your wall. Either way, the tape wasn't going to work, and my fine paint brush skills definitely weren't cutting it. I needed another solution.

This is the yellow wall's window. It doesn't look terrible, but if you look closely, you can see where it bled over into what will be yellow paint. The yellow is so thin that the primer shows through. Trying to get the yellow to cover black is going to be a nightmare. So on the grey wall, I wanted a better solution that would still give me as much of a clean line as I could get without sacrificing the grey paint that I already put on the wall.

Thanks to some inspiration from my sister, I decided to try a non-traditional approach. I had a ton of color cards that we got at the Home Depot when deciding what color to paint the wall. I started by ripping some up to create a border around the bottom of the window (the hardest part). Then I realized, I could continue up the sides of the window as well. It took tearing a few pieces and trying to fold a "straight" line before I realized I should just find the scissors. I thought I should cut on the lines, but that only gave me 4 pieces per page, and honestly, I couldn't even stay straight on the white line, so I just cut them into small strips as evenly as I could. The little pieces of painters tape holding them down wouldn't be pushed down hard enough to remove any paint, and in the off chance that they did, I figured it would be easier to spot treat those errors than ones close to the black paint. My next epiphany came when I got halfway up the one side of the window and felt the cards starting to fall onto each other. I should have started at the top to let gravity help me hold the cards down. I continued from the top and connected them at the middle on the right side, and went top down on the left side.

I figured that it couldn't look much worse than the other window did, so it was worth a shot. This is how it looked before I started painting (obviously). I did have to hold the cards down at times, so I got a little bit of paint of my fingers. You might laugh at that obvious statement, but I needed to be aware that I had wet black paint on my fingers and to make sure not to touch any other part of the room until I cleaned them off (a surprisingly difficult task). While it did take a little bit of time to prep the window, it was surprisingly less stressful than the one that I did free-hand.

As expected, the paint went on very faint, just like the other window. I could sand that finish until I was blue in the face, but the amount of varnish on those windows (and doors) was never coming off with my 220 grit sandpaper and baby soft hands. Three coats were in my future. The edging didn't quite need all 3 coats though, making it even less stressful. On the second (or third) coat, I dripped a little onto the grey paint. I quickly grabbed Rachel's "magic spray" onto a paper towel and wiped away the stain with little evidence.

Once I had completed the black parts of the room, I moved onto the yellow walls. I toggled between cutting and rolling in order to preserve my sanity. I made it a good way around the room before taking a dinner break (yes, it took most of the day just to get the black parts painted or touched up). When I went back to work after dinner, I started making stupid errors. See photo below to discover what happens when you stop paying attention to your work space.

Fortunately, I noticed that I had now successfully painted one leg of the ladder yellow before moving it onto an un-clothed floor. Side note, the pouring attachments for the paint cans worked wonders in addition to the handy paint bucket things with removable (and disposable) liners. The lids made pouring into the buckets or rolling pans a lot easier, especially after freshly breaking the seal for the first time.

Yet again, I digress. As expected, the yellow paint went on very thin and would definitely need multiple coats in order to cover the various marks on the wall. It's definitely a bold look to the room and not for everyone, but it's coming along.

And here's the finished look of each of the windows. The paint color cards made the grey window look a ton better than the yellow window, and I will definitely use this method again (but maybe with actual card stock instead of the paint cards, which were the only resource we currently had since our lives are in boxes in a storage unit on main street).

After 3 coats of yellow paint and 2 coats of grey, you can barely see where the molding used to be on the wall. Honestly, the worst part of the wall is where the ceiling paint ran down a little. We're still debating resurrecting the molding to use as crown molding. I asked Jason to paint the quarter round while I was working on the walls, and he accidentally painted the molding instead. I never intended to use black crown molding (I only wanted the quarter round to be black), but now we're considering the idea if we can find the extra pieces that we're missing at an affordable cost.

The room is quite bright and a little shocking (go big or go home), but I think that once we get the furniture in there, the total effect will show through, and it will be a cheerful and quirky room of its own! I can't wait to see it completed!

Master Bedroom

The two twin beds pushed together makes me giggle! But honestly, it was quite a chore to get the queen box spring up the steps, down the hall, and into this room!

This room is going to be the death of us. We started working on the master bedroom once Micah's room was pretty much completed. Rachel got started on the trim and walls before I was even able to finish painting Micah's door. I feel like painting this room went the quickest, but that's probably because I had very little involvement in that process and I'm pretty sure Rachel works faster when I'm not bothering her.

I was able to step in and get some rolling done while she continued cutting the ceiling and trim. As usual, as soon as Micah needed me though, I had to abandon my task at hand. Naturally, Rachel carried on as usual in order to give us some progress on our house.

The floor had that same weird stain that the other two rooms had.

This was the last room to get sanded, which equals the sloppiest and roughest job. I feel like it took 3 years (and I wasn't even the one on my hands and knees working!), but it really only took a week to get all 3 rooms sanded down.

By the time I finished staining Micah's room, I needed a break. I was determined to complete the third room though before going to bed, so I convinced Jason to help me knock the room out before midnight. We each took a half of the room (and we'll never tell which part belongs to who), and we were able to finish the room before going to bed. Yes, we used the wrong method on this room as well as the other two rooms by never wiping up our stain.

This is how shiny it still looked the next morning and even into the following day. Like Micah's room, it wasn't necessarily the stain color that was still on the surface but rather some of the oil. I tried wiping it up as best as I could. I'm pretty sure this is the main reason why when we placed our...::cough, cough:: water-based polyurethane onto the floors, we got the distinctive oil and water look. Most of it dried fine, and almost all of the rest came out with some light sanding. This room continued to get rougher and rougher with each coat of polyurethane. We finished the last coat the day before we left for vacation with the anticipation that we could start moving furniture onto the floor upon our return from our trip.

I knew that we needed to touch up the baseboards where the sander had nicked the paint, where the stupid blue painters tape had pulled off parts of the paint and where we accidentally got some stain or polyurethane onto the trim. Of course, before you can paint, you have to clean the walls. They were still COVERED in saw dust. I started by brushing off the parts that had accumulated a significant pile of dust (windows and doors). Then I took a rag (my dad's old t-shirt) and wiped off the walls before taking a damp sponge over the walls to remove any excess residue. The amount of dust initially forced into the air caused me to take a break, which made this task take 2 full days before I could even start touching up the paint. Meanwhile, I realized that I never painted the quarter round, which should definitely be in place before we start moving furniture into the room. The list was adding up.

I got all of those tasks done, and while sliding around on my behind to pain and dust, I realized that our floor was unacceptably rough. I crossed my fingers and approached Jason with the idea that maybe we could try just one more coat of polyurethane after one more good sanding. He looked like he might cry. He knew it was worth a shot, but we both just wanted this room to be done. After some pouting, he agreed to try it one more time. We thought that maybe it would be faster to use the orbital sander with a very light grit paper. WRONG. It went straight down to the stain. Do not pass go. So he still used the orbital sand paper, but just attached to his hands. We had tried using the blocks, but those wear out so quickly and you spend the whole time brushing your knuckles against the floor. It didn't take nearly as long as he'd feared, and the room quickly swept up with a broom and a damp sponge.

The room looks the exact same in a picture as it did before, but it is significantly smoother now that we went through the process again. Now we're just waiting for his next day off or half-day to get him to re-install the quarter round, and the room will finally be DONE!

Micah's Room

Micah's room was the only bedroom with carpeting. We crossed our fingers and hoped that it would have the same wood underneath the carpet (in somewhat decent shape) so that we could refinish it with the other two floors. Either way, the carpet had to go. Once all of the former owner's stuff was gone and we got a closer look, we noticed that the closet (the door in the last picture there) only had carpet about halfway into it, followed by that same old wood in the other rooms. Score! We were nervous about whether the carpet had made this floor significantly worse than the other rooms, but it was definitely worth the risk.

The ceiling and walls needed a lot of work and repair, so Jason and Rachel spent a lot of time prepping this room for painting. We decided to paint the room before sanding the floors since #1 we needed an entire weekend to sand and #2 it was easier than moving a drop cloth around the room. Rachel painted the ceiling while Jason fixed some cracks in the wall. On a whim, Rachel suggested that we use the paint we purchased for the master bedroom's trim as the trim for Micah's room as well. It turned out great! As expected, we had to wait until all of the spackling was done, dry and sanded before we could prime those spots. And once the primer was dry, then we could get started on painting the walls. Rachel cut most of this room because I still was not qualified. I worked around the windows, but the ceiling trim was her responsibility. I worked on the green while she worked on the brown sections. Once Micah got too fussy though, I had to abandon ship, and Rachel almost always picked up my slack. We used every last drop of green in the bucket, but the room got painted.

We were now ready to remove the quarter round and pull up the carpet. We held our breath hoping that there was padding under the carpet (to give us some lee-way for cutting through the carpet) and that it would come up cleanly.

There was padding under the carpet, and it did easily lift. Unfortunately, Jason was convinced that since we were sanding down the floors that he didn't have to be careful with how deep he used his utility knife. I'll ruin the surprise now and tell you that after the hours of sanding, staining and polyurethaning the room, I can still see where he ran his knife to cut the carpet. Lesson learned? Probably not. It will be one of many flaws in our house that few people will notice without looking for. You might also notice that even this floor had the ghost of an area rug just like the other two rooms. We've heard numerous rationales for this, but none of them have completely convinced me yet. Either way, they're not as noticeable now.

The sanding process was long and painful, included a lot of arguing, but gave us a great looking floor.

Clearly the "before" picture.

This is after most of the sanding (and a lot of vacuuming) was done.

I cheated on the stain (as described in the "Spare Room"). The dirty rags are simply for show, since I only used them to wipe my hands off occasionally or wipe off a spot where I bumped the trim above that awful blue painters tape. At this point in the room, I snapped my foam brush's handle off but continued working anyway because we didn't have a spare brush.

We loved the color, but this "wet" look scared us quite a bit, especially since it lasted for more than 24 hours. I'm not sure if it's because of my experimental stain application process or the incredible humidity that we were dealing with at the time. You could wipe a cloth on it and not get anything transferred, so we think it was just the oil seeping out. We tried cleaning it off as much as we could. By this point, we were sick of the whole process and wanted it over with, so we went ahead and started to polyurethane. It looked a ton better even after the first coat was dry. After the third coat, we're very happy with this single coat of stain on this floor.

Once the floor was completed, all we had left to do was to pick away at some pealing ceiling paint (say that 3 times fast), patch it, prime it and paint it (all time consuming). Another lesson learned, move the drop cloth so that it is under you when painting a ceiling. After all of our hard work on the floors, Micah's now has polka dots of white on spots where the drop cloth didn't cover. I was able to pick off a lot of it, but some spots were just too much work to get the paint off. We'll figure out a solution later.

After a good sweeping (or two... or three), it's now finally ready for the furniture and wall decals. Micah is FINALLY going to have a nursery!