The Renovation Continues

John decided a couple of weeks ago that he needed to get the sitting room and spare bedroom (upstairs) done before he can feel ok about getting started on the RV again. After talking about it over and over, we decided to make the front room an office instead of another bedroom. Why? Well, 90% of our time is spent upstairs so it would be nice to have the office up there too — that way all of our living space is on the same floor. The basement then becomes devoted “airplane factory” with a couple of bedrooms that only get used once or twice each year. It just makes more sense that way.

We were originally going to remodel that front room first, because we were going to use it for guests at Thanksgiving. As I was removing a particularly awful wallpaper border that Juliette (the previous owner, also known as “That Dumb B*tch Juliette, or just TDBJ for short) had put up, I discovered the following underneath:

We had heard that Connie, the previous-previous owner, had spent hours hand-stenciling borders in all of the rooms. Because Juliette had painted over most of them we had never actually seen one until now. But there were holes in the walls that had to be patched and we have been unsuccessful in matching the paint so the very thought that we were going to have to Kilz over this beautiful work made us both sick. We thought that maybe we could tape off the area and leave it as it is, as a sort of border (and it would match the green paint we picked out), but the off-white color of the surrounding paint doesn’t match the bright white that we put on the woodwork. *sigh* It’s going to have to go. We got to meet Connie (and her husband Rich) when we first moved in, and have their phone number, so I’ve thought about offering to pay Connie to come back and re-create her original borders. Unfortunately that’s just not in the budget right now so it’ll have to be back-burnered. So…….

Once we decided that the front room would be an office instead of a bedroom, we focused our efforts on getting the back room (the sitting room) done first since that would be our escape-hatch during Thanksgiving. As I was removing a curtain rod in that room I realized that Juliette had painted over a wallpaper border — so it will have to be removed. Apparently, Connie had chosen a removable border so it peeled off very easily. What we didn’t realize at the time was that some of the glue remained. The first coat of white paint cracked so John added a second coat that cracked too. Then he sanded it and discovered that trying to sand it all off was going to be next to impossible. We finally got a good coat of Kilz on it late last night and woke up to — no cracks. John’s Kilz’ing the rest of the walls today (and the front room as well) so that there is a nice even base for our light pastel paint. He says that the room should have at least one coat of blue on it before we go to bed. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I’ve ordered the furniture — two gliders with ottomans and a small table to go in between. I also bought a ceiling fan and picked out a couple of floor lamps for supplemental light just in case we need it. The chairs arrive on Friday so John is under pressure to get that room done. But it will be beautiful!

Update: It’s 9pm and John is nearly finished the blue coat. The “in progress” photo below doesn’t do it much justice — it’s really beautiful in person. Looks like we may be able to call it done with only one coat.

John will replace all of the outlets with white ones this week (they’re really old and discolored) and I need to find some window sheers. I like these, but don’t know if Bed, Bath & Beyond has them in shorter lengths — I don’t need 84″ panels.

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