Progress

Progress on the living room is being made. The living room is home to two projects right now. It's the room that we are hoping to paint soon and where the wood stove is going.

Work on the living room in preparation for painting has been going on for months. The walls had really old wallpaper (I'm thinking 1950s era) that had been painted over several times. With the help of my mother-in-law we stripped the paint and then the wallpaper from the walls. It took forever and created a few blisters along the way!!! Well, in the last two weeks, my husband and I have stripped all of the remaining glue from the walls using a diluted vinegar mixture. Then we washed the walls using TSP (without Phosphorous). This stuff is amazing! I am a big fan. Any glue left on the walls dissolved instantly and it left the walls super smooth. Well, they are smooth except for the gouges that took place during the arduous wallpaper-removing phase. There is also one plaster wall that is crumbling, has several cracks, and has extremely uneven texture. So, we spent a few days repairing the surfaces of the walls. My husband read online to use caulk in the cracks. Plaster cracks are due to shifting. Caulk has more give than plaster compound (aka, spackling plaster) and will not be as noticeable when there is more gradual shifting. I used plaster compound to repair all holes, divots, and gouges on the walls and ceiling.

After my up-close-and-personal experience with the walls, trying to apply plaster compound as smoothly as possible, I decided that we need to do something to, if not all walls, at least to the "ugly" wall to trick the eye. So, my husband and I went back to Lowe's to look at paint options. Because we did not want to spend much more money on paint, we decided to do rag rolling, which only requires two colors of paint. We had already planned for the "ugly" wall to be the accent wall, so we were all set.

We are going to paint all the walls with a base coat of a white that has a slight green tint to it, called Gilded Endive (Valspar #7003-22). Then the accent wall will be rag-rolled with Green Tea (Valspar #6008-8A). My hope is that the rag rolling will create an illusion that will hide some of the unevenness of the wall.

Of course before we get to the step of applying paint, we still have to sand the caulk and plaster compound, wipe down the walls one final time so that they will be free of dust, and prime the walls using Valspar's high-hiding primer. I'll update you on the progress. Here are some pictures of me scrubbing the wall with TSP.





The other progress being made is on the wood stove front. Not a whole lot has happened, but it is rather exciting. In order to have a fire-safe area around the wood stove, we have to put fire-proof materials underneath the wood stove. We bought some cement board and slate tiles that the wood stove will sit on. It's going to be beautiful! So that we could put this down, Bill removed the horrid 50+ year old carpet from this room.

Please excuse the mess, this room is undergoing lots of work!