Before we closed on our house last April, we had already made a loose plan of the order in which we wanted to work on the various rooms. We agreed that the kids needed a safe and comfortable place to play and sleep, so the girls' bedroom became our first priority. This is what the room looked like when the previous owners lived in it:
There was a lot of work to be done: stripping, sanding and staining woodwork, repairing cracks in the plaster on both the walls and ceiling, mudding, figuring out storage since there was not a closet, and what to do about that floor?!? I'll take you on a little photo trip through the first few weeks of "restoring" the girl's bedroom.
I'm not sure what I'm doing here, but I do look like a professional, don't I? ;)
The start of stripping woodwork. The previous owners had already removed the baseboards, so we took those before we closed on the house and got a head start on stripping those. All the nooks and details in the woodwork make it quite tedious to strip!!
The window trim has been stripped!!
My foray into using power tools. Mwahahaha.
Okay, seriously mom, I know we're wearing old clothes to work in, but M&M pants? Come on! ;) Oh yeah, by the way, my mom is AWESOME with the orbit sander!
We used good ole Big Wally's Plaster Magic to repair the cracks in our plaster. The quick run-down is that you drill holes around the cracks, squirt a special adhesive into the holes with a caulk gun which adheres the plaster back to the laths behind, then screw clamps in for 24 hours to let the glue dry. Remove clamps, mud, and no more cracks! Just like magic...plus 72 hours of hard, intensive, dirty, sweaty labor...but it's MAGIC!!
This project gave me a lot of "first" experiences...my first time mudding (as we call it around here).
Walls are mudded, sanded, mudded, and sanded again! Trim work is stripped and ready for sanding!
A little creative pic here...we got tired of smelling the chemical stripper and went for the heat gun. Much more fun.
I can only say two words about the ceiling: NOT FUN.
Or I could say four: PAIN IN THE NECK.
Even gramps and gram got in on the action...this was a true family affair.
Oh yeah, there's Josh. I guess he did a little work, too. Although, it kind of looks like he's just pretending...hmmm. But, either way, we're still having fun!
And lastly, Grandma helped me stain the baseboards.
Okay, so that's the tour for today. I hope you enjoyed seeing the first part of our remodeling job: some staining, some sanding, some drilling, and the bonus: some nice respirator pics. Next time on Adventures in Restoration, I'll show you how we fixed our storage problems in the girls' room!!
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