Two Painted Rooms! Two!

No, we haven't been buried alive by piles of Stuff, never to see the light of day again. The combination of weather in the high 90s and the return of my allergies (probably because the cat is pulling out her fur again) has led to a severe drop in my energy levels. While this is good in that the rest has helped my back recover - I haven't needed my muscle relaxer in a week! - it's less good for housey progress.

I did accomplish two things last week. One, I put together my cheap!desk from Target and yoinked out the old 'counter'. Two, I painted the master bedroom.

I have conflicting feelings on painting, especially when it comes to that room. One day, we're going to have to do some work on the trim in that room, as well as install a pocket door for the bathroom, which is going to mean the room will need to be repainted. The trim along one side of the bathroom door and the bottom of the wall between that and the closet door is odd... It's not wood which was cut to be trim; it's just wood that the PO slapped up and painted, so it's wider than the rest of the trim in the room. I should have just pulled it down along with the rest of the baseboards, but it was hot enough last week that I wasn't thinking clearly, illustrated by the fact that I climbed up my stepstool, trim brush in hand, and nearly started painting before I realized I hadn't taped the ceiling.

(Somewhere in my amnesiac madness, I apparently taped the cat as well and turned her into a crazy-eyed demon.)



Thusly, 'Painting with no air-conditioner when it's 95F INSIDE' joins my list of Things I Shall Never Do Again (only as of yesterday do we finally have an air-conditioner in that bedroom, due to delays caused by badly-timed wasps). Unfortunately, this whole angst-ridden event was unavoidable. Here is why:



That is what the bedroom looked like as painted by the POs. Keep in mind that this is a fairly small room and we have exceptionally low (7.5') ceilings. It is not, therefore, a room that could ever look good painted the color of the interior of Dracula's grandmother's coffin. The POs also didn't use enough coats of paint (I've heard you have to use a LOT when you paint something red) to get the color even AND it looks like they used a satin or gloss finish. At any rate, it was disturbingly ugly and not something we could live in.

We used two layers of primer to cover it up before we moved in and lived with that until last week. Then on Saturday and Sunday of the junk-removal weekend, M and I primed and painted the ceiling (rather than just getting a standard Ceiling White, we got the 'white' shades for each of the different colors we chose for the rooms..so this ceiling is 'Mild Mint' to match the 'Morning Breeze' of the walls). On Monday and Tuesday, I mustered up enough fortitude to paint despite the heat and this is what the walls look like now:



I am really embarrassed about the sad state of that 'after' picture, both in terms of photo quality (the ceiling really isn't that uneven! I swear!) and our mess of a bedroom, but I got tired of trying to get a good shot and I don't see the point in doing up the room nicely until we actually have floors and curtains and such. We also need to get a smaller bed so that things can be arranged properly... it wouldn't be such a problem if it weren't for, say, needing to be able to get to the bathroom door. (Our current bed is actually 'beds'. M and his dad built these stacking twin beds that can be stacked (duh) or put together to make one king bed. My half has a 3" memory foam mattress over top of it, which is why it's so uneven looking - I tossed our winter blanket over it all to attempt to disguise this, but it was unsuccessful. Our plan is to get a queen-sized bed for that room and distribute the stacking beds to the other bedrooms.)