Forecast: Patchy Holes With A Mild Stripe

After tackling our master bedroom, we felt very confident that our guest bedroom/office would be a breeze. Oh, were we mistaken.

This was the room when we began. After learning from our neighbor Mike that this room once housed three children and our future dining room housed two more we knew that this house was full of history. You can also tell if you look carefully on these photos that you can even tell that it was quickly painted over to house more children. If you look carefully you can see a hint of a "Caitlyn" were left under the paint. As much as I wanted to change the room, part of me loved the little hand prints immortalized on our wall (now just in these photos).

Another way you could tell kids were in here, paint on the closet doors.

This is another example of the previous owner's handy work. He had a faux trim with paint on the wall. It looks like he just drew a line in pencil over the primer and that's where he stopped painting. Classy.

So back to us. We are officially holding our first official house gathering this Saturday, a bachelorette party for my friend and sorority sister, Kate. In preparation of the night we wanted to get this bedroom painted in case guests had a few too many cocktails they would have a place to safely sleep. This also goes along with getting more bedding from the previous IKEA post.

With every project we do, we learn a little more. The last room taught us if we are going to be redoing trim anyways to remove it from the wall so that you can get a nice crisp line. Easy enough right? It probably would have been if the previous owner had not seemly attached his trim while the paint was still wet. We are not big fans of this guy if you can't already tell. When we went to remove the trim. Part of the drywall came with it.

So not fully knowing what to do, we Spackled over and sanded the area smooth twice and then applied textural primer. The next day I found out that was the correct thing to do from our maintenance man from work *phew. 

Also while taking the trim off I punched three holes in the wall with the trim crowbar. I need to stop having such Herculean strength.

That fix was actually quite easy. We used a few layers of self-adhesive drywall tape for about $4 and then Spackled right over the top of it.

After all that, we were finally ready to paint. We primed the walls with our five gallon bucket of Olympic primer we bought to carry us through most of the house. The color I selected is called Chilled Wine from Pittsburgh Paints. We color matched it to Olympic Premium low VOC paint, like we used in the master bedroom.

I even tried out at new trim brush hoping that this would help cut in a few areas in the corners of the trim around the windows and walls.

From the next stage, neither of the boys were impressed.

I trimmed out the room and the stripe from before still was really showing through. We stopped and put another coat of primer on immediately.

We put the first coat of paint on. Got these results.

After our second coat, we ran out of the one gallon of paint we thought it would take to do this small room.

So the room won't completed before the party (sad face) but guests will have a place to sleep.

What sorts of projects have you done that you thought were going to be really easy and then turned out to be anything but?