1970's Called.... It Wants Your Paneling

November 2013

After the wedding, Josh and I took a much needed month vacation from any house or life projects.  It was glorious!  Then it happened, I started to feel the itch and needed to find a quick and easy house project that wouldn't cost me anything.  Just so you can understand how much I need house projects I started this on November 9, 40 days after we returned from our honeymoon. 40 days and 40 nights without house project, the longest I had gone in over 4 years. Impressive.

 

 

Ever since painting the windows in the guest room I had the urge to paint the dark wood panelling in the space.  Originally, I embraced it in all it's 1970's glory, but the fact was it was in pretty beat up shape.  There were several areas that needed patching and repair. So it started on a Saturday when I spent a few hours moving everything to one side of the room and patching and caulking a few holes, gouges, and cracks.  A quick sand and wipe down and I was ready to rumble. 

 

 

We only have panelling on two walls, so this was going to be a quick project. I decided to put the primer on Saturday night right after dinner so it had a good 10 hours to dry.  Very quickly I discovered our primer had gone off (apparently 3 years is all you get with Kilz). It was chunky and smelled horrible. After spending 30 minutes trying to salvage it by mixing and adding bleach I had to call it.  I managed to find another primer deep in the depths of our basement hoard.  By the time I restarted it was 8pm and suddenly my easy project had me painting late into the night in a grumpy mood. Sigh.

 

This photo was taken with my cell phone- not classy

Sunday ,I woke up early so I could get two coats of paint on the panels.  The primer had essentially absorbed into the wall so I knew multiple coats may be in my future.  I decided to paint the entire wall with a brush.  I figured I could get more paint on, get into the crevices of the panelling and wood grain and hopefully give the panelling a more wood work look.  I used a three inch brush and moved through the room painting our bone white acrinamel.  It definitely was slow in comparison to a roller, but it wasn't horrible.  It took me about 90 minutes to finish the first coat.  Later, around dinner time, I went back and did a second coat.  Luckily, that seemed to be all the room needed. 

 

I cleaned the floors and dusted the furniture and then put everything back into place on Monday.  This is now the brightest room in our house.  It gets both South and West light so with the new white panelling it practically glowed afterward.  A small mini update and the room was ready for my parents to visit for Thanksgiving.
 

A Whole New Room

October 2011

Up until now, we have been pretty elusive about our back bedroom.  This room is located on the ground floor in the southwest corner of our house.  It made a brief appearance in one of our first posts as the hoarder room aka. Room of Requirement.  Since then, we have had a roommate in the space. Since this was her personal space I didn't want to make it internet fodder so we have left the space out.  She was a great help and started it off with a new coat of paint and took down the peeling wallpaper that covered the wood paneling.  It made a huge improvement taking down the wallpaper and exposing the vintage 1970's 'wood' paneling.  Our roommate lived with us for a little over a year and when she moved out we were struck by the new addition of a room into our lives. 

In the past, we had owned effectively a two bedroom house, we suddenly had a third bedroom.  We had a guest room!  Or I guess you can say we almost had a guest room. We didn't exactly have any furniture or real plans for the room.  Josh and I really liked the color our roommate had chosen.  It is roughly the color of butternut squash and it works well with the amazing west and south light. What we weren't sure we liked was the dark paneling on two walls.  However, since it is just our guest room we have decided to keep it for now.  Back during our exterior remodel we changed out all the windows in the room (which we have yet to paint) but they were a definite improvement over the broken-glass-held-together-with-tape arrangement that was there. 

Like most guest rooms, it has slowly been filled with various things that didn't fit in other rooms. In August, for my birthday, my parents got us a new bed (more on this later).  So, our old bed frame came downstairs.  I also had an old ikea bookcase that became a nightstand. Slowly, we purchased a new mattress, pillows, comforters and starting making it into a usable room. We knew when we did the big master bedroom remodel that some more furniture might come down to join it.  The good news was we were able to entertain our very first overnighters (Kristen and Kyle yay!) in their own room on October 17 (big time grown-up moment).