I can't express how happy we are that we finally have a room completely finished from top to bottom. I mean this has been 6 long months in the making! Not because it takes 6 months to remodel one room, but because life just kept rerouting us to more pressing matters. However with help from family we buckled down and together got it done.
Let's start by getting everyone back up to speed. Here's where we started. When we moved in we named this room the Rose Room (after the rose wallpaper). Let's get real for a minute, the ceiling has some serious water damage, the walls are covered in dated wallpaper, the floor has water damage, and it is sporting a pretty outdated radiator. But the potential is totally there, if you look close enough.
We started with peeling the wall paper. Definitely not as easy as it sounds. It involves razor blades, water, and lots of scraping. But I'd like to think we have a rhythm down now and maybe the rest of the rooms won't take quite as long as this one.
After some serious peeling we discovered and decided to expose the brick from the original fireplace chimney. Apparently I totally skipped out on photographing this process along with the mudding of all the cracks in the plaster. But to say there were a lot of cracks would be a severe understatement. I believe we went through four 5 gallon buckets of drywall mud for the entire room.
Next was putting new drywall up on the ceiling. We purchased a drywall lift for that and the hubs says it's a life saver.
After the new drywall was applied to the ceiling it had to be finished with joint compound or as we call it "mud". There is only one person in our family that can pull that off.
My Mother. Or as Stella would say "My Mudder"
So a lot of pressure fell onto her for that. But as always she came through!
Next comes arguably the worst part of any remodel...
Sanding the mud.
If you have never had to do this before, consider yourself lucky. You have to wear a mask, you get filthy dirty, just the sheer amount of dust it creates is overwhelming.
Let the priming begin. What they don't tell you about painting a ceiling is the amount of paint that manages to get in your eyes and that terrible neck pain from staring up at it.
So I may have been accused of "Blind Painting" a few times. It's a new term created just for me. It involves rolling the ceiling while looking at the floor.
Finally getting to the good part we started painting the walls. We started with one blue and completely hated it. So we painted it all over again. Thankfully this blue we love. We sealed the exposed brick with a water based acrylic and stained the quarter round that protects the corner of the chimney.
After painting it was time to refinish the floors. We rented an orbital sander, and it shooketh me to my core while taking way longer than it should have. I wish I had a photo of this to really give you a visual but since I was the one sanding all I have is a token selfie before I started.
After the sanding came the staining and polyurethane. I mixed together two different stains to match as closely as possible to what the floors originally looked like. Poly takes about a week to cure so after working at an extremely fast pace to get this room ready for a birthday girls deadline all we could do was wait.
After a very long week of telling the birthday girl just a few more days. We were finally able to start putting in some of the new furniture, including putting together her canopy bed. Since we wanted the big reveal to be a surprise her little sister Emmeline was happy to assist Daddy in putting the bed together.
Slowly but surely things started really coming together. Lilah requested a Harry Potter theme and we agreed that we could keep the upscale, antique vibe while still giving her the room she always dreamed of.
Lighting for her was at the top of the list. She wanted a room that felt snuggly, soft and cozy with twinkle lights scattered throughout the room. We added accents like a golden snitch, suitcases, a pillow reading nine and 3/4, and flying keys to bring the theme to life.
A desk to double as a vanity is exactly what every 11 year old girl needs.
Let me just say it must be good to be 11.
I leave you now with a before and after and I leave myself with a bit of motivation to keep myself going forward to the next room...
xoxo
Kara Lee