Painting the Living Room

This weekend we decided to finally work on the Living Room. Before we bought the house, we decided that the Living Room would be the first room we'd work on and finish. That way we'd have a "clean" room to go to relax or eat while we were doing all of the major work on the rest of the house. That didn't work out exactly as planned.

On Day 2, we removed the wallpaper in the Living Room. That revealed original plaster walls, which were in okay shape for 240 year old walls, but weren't exactly to our liking. They had a very rough finish (felt/looked like rough stone) and the previous owners had scoured the plaster when they were hanging the wallpaper, which resulted in holes in the plaster which had dry sand flowing out. So we abandoned the room and moved on. 

Fast forward 3 months, and we're now living in the house and need our Living Room! For the first month we lived here we had our TV set up and our two couches. That's it. 3/4 of the room was covered in boxes and tools. We had a 18" path that went from the Kitchen to the couches. I could only sit on one half of my couch if I wanted to see the TV without boxes blocking it.

So when my SILs said they were coming down for the weekend, I immediately knew what we had to do. It took a whole half day to just clean everything out of the room. With only the couches and TV cabinet left the room looked huge!


Our first act was to clean everything with TSP. **We really should have stripped all the paint from the trim and doors, but in the essence of time, we decided to just paint over it. This is something that is on my long-term To Do List though. There are about 9 layers of paint already on the trim, and it's very clumpy looking. It WILL get done eventually though!** The trim wasn't very dirty, but the walls were. The TSP cleaned off any remaining wallpaper and glue, as well as years of dirt.  We decided that the casing around the doors would need either major sanding or the paint stripped because they were in pretty beat up shape. So for this weekend, we skipped over the door casing.


Then it was time to fill in the holes and sand the walls where possible.  It would be impossible to have perfectly smooth walls, and frankly, we didn't want that, so rather than sanding the patches completely, I left them a little bumpy. That way they blended well with the rest of the wall.

The picture totally doesn't do it justice, but the walls already had many years of patches. And none of the patches were white. There were beige patches, yellow patches, green patches (I don't get that one...), brown patches, etc. It took 3 coats of paint to cover all of them completely!


By the end of the weekend, we had the entire fireplace wall (trim and wall), summer beam (large beam in the center of the room) and half of the closet wall painted. That's the work of 3 people for a day and a half! Like I said... 3 coats of paint on the walls and 2 or 3 on the trim. But it looks great so far! At first I didn't like the color... it had a pinkish tint to it, and looked metallic in the sunlight. But by the end of the day today, I really liked it. I have a feeling that it was the way the first coat of paint was covering, and also the comparison between the color and the ugly whitish wall.

See? Doesn't it look pinkish?

I won't do a before-after picture yet, because it's not done... but what do you think so far???