What I Did On My Spring Break

My bedroom walls before, and after an insane number hours of painting:

And here, here is the vile tan gold ugly, nasty and definitely not hypo-allergenic carpet we needed to tear out, and the pre-finished bamboo flooring we’re putting in it’s place:

There’s still a lot of work to do. High on that list is to actually move the furniture back into our room! But first, we have to, well, finish installing the floor. And then re-install the baseboards, locate, purchase and install quarter round molding…actually, that might be it. I think.

As is always the case with home improvement projects, this one didn’t go quite as planned. But still, overall, it was better than I expected.

Initially, I was going to leave the border up, tape it off, and paint under it. Obviously, I changed my mind, and had to tack on an extra couple of days for wallpaper removal (but the orbital sander wasn’t required, so really, that hardly counts.)

And then, I wasn’t going to paint the trim, but the baseboards had to come off the walls to install the flooring. Aside from the fact that they got a little dinged up in the process, because part of it had been covered up with carpet the last time we painted they weren’t actually all one color.

Well, once you paint the baseboards, you have to paint the door frames. And then the doors look really dingy and aren’t quite the same white so you have to paint those. In for a penny, in for a pound, the windows and frames need a fresh coat too.

So between the two coats of wall paint (that color just makes me deliriously happy – or maybe it’s the paint fumes?) and the trim I hadn’t intended to paint, I spent sixteen hours painting our room. (Spread out over several days of course!) What that meant was that we didn’t rent the giant floor stapler thingy until today. And since one of us had to watch Carrie, Denis had to do the whole process himself: staple in some boards, measure, head to the garage, cut an end piece, repeat, repeat, repeat, jigsaw the board going around the closet door frame…you get the idea.

So, next Sunday we’ll hopefully manage to finish the floor. And then it’s just a matter of moving several large, heavy pieces of furniture back in. Oh, wait, I forgot about the baseboards…