Nursery walls are finished!

Another room down! At this rate I should be done some time in the early 22 century...

Anyways some of you may remember what the room looked like originally.



If you look closely in the first picture you may notice the original colors of the room, a light blue below the picture rail and a green above it. I'm pretty sure these are the original colors because the paint is in the skim coat of plaster and not painted on. We decided to try to match these colors. For numerous reasons we've decided to paint all the trim upstairs instead of refinishing it. One being that we dont have time to sand every bit of trim. We really need to hurry and get this done so we can get a conventional mortgage. Even so, it's very hard to paint over all that beautiful heartpine. We still plan on refinishing the downstairs trim though.

I've already posted earlier about all the work it took to scrape and sand the walls and ceilings in this room. Once all the loose paint was scraped and sanded off I patched everything with mud:


I then sanded the walls and ceiling again. Once all that was done I primered the walls, ceiling, and trim.



Next it was finally time to paint. I painted the trim first. It's much easier that way.


Then at last I painted the walls, blue first, then the green.




I cant wait until the floors are refinished! At the last minute I decided to refinish the mantle instead of painting it and I'm really glad I did.



It should look great once I finish stripping it. I still havent decided if I'm going to use poly or shellac on it though. I think poly should be fine, there's plenty of color in it already. Also, I didnt paint the doors because I'm going to refinish them too.

My next task will either be the upstairs hall or guest bedroom #2, I havent decided yet.

shifting gears

I know I said I was going to finish the Breakfast room in my last post but we've decided to change our strategy a bit. Our construction loan is getting pretty expensive, not to mention the fact that all we're paying every month is interest only. We need to get the house done so we can refinance and get a regular mortgage at a much lower rate.

Because of this we've decided to move our attentions upstairs and finish the hell called plaster/drywall/mud work. As you may remember we finished the master bedroom last month but we still have 3 other bedrooms, a long central hall, and 2 bathrooms that have hardly been touched. We need to finish these ASAP so the floor guys can get up here and do their thing.

I've been working in the Nursery for the past 4 days scraping and sanding off tons of old flaking paint from the walls and ceiling. For the past 2 days I've been bent over backwards sanding the stipling off the ceiling. Needless to say I find it hard to walk upright now.

For those of you who may not remember this was the condition of the upstairs bedrooms when we bought the place:


The upstairs was vacant long before the downstairs was. In addition to all the peeling paint, there were whole sections of the ceiling that were falling in. I patched those a few months back.

Here's the room after scraping paint and sanding stipling:




Looks like it snowed in here. I looked like that floor when I was done by the way. One thing you may notice is that the original skim coat of plaster above the picture rail and on the ceiling is green and below the rail it's a pale blue(the cream underneath the gold is paint that's on the blue plaster). I actually like that green color, not sure about the blue though...

After that I started in on skimming the ceiling with mud mixed with sand.


I didnt get much done because my back went out. Hopefully my back will be a little better by this afternoon. That way I can finish the mudding tonight, and sand and primer tomorrow.

I also wanted to post a picture of the doors upstairs:


I dont think I've ever seen 2 panel doors like this before. All of the doors upstairs are like this, they are all rim locks also. Downstairs we have the more common 4 panel doors like these:


Has anyone seen 2 panel doors like these before?

Nursery / Guest Bedroom 2

Here is what will become the nursery:





and here is the second guest bedroom: