Not So Scary Anymore..

This is actually a project I finished over the summer, but I finally just took pictures of it this week. Between work, other projects and a LOT of cloudy days, I had an excuse every day for months.

You'll remember from earlier posts that this is the room we've dubbed The Twilight Room. When we first viewed the house it was completely empty, except for two Twilight posters. And the walls were a beautiful striped montage of black, magenta, and purple, with a lovely bright blue carpet. Just delightful.

R claimed this room as his soon after we moved in. He took the desk that the previous owner had left and that's where he had his computer. He doesn't use it much.. maybe once or twice a week. The room wasn't really a priority. We have the guest beds set up in the Guest Bedroom, and R didn't really care about the scary walls (which by this point were primed, but you could still see the stripes peeking through).

However, this spring, I was attempting to organize all of the remaining boxes upstairs and realized that I could empty the majority of them if only I had somewhere to put my excess office supplies. I had boxes and boxes full of art and craft supplies, pens and pencils, notebooks.. etc. Plus a bunch of random stuff like our winter coats (downstairs coat closet isn't very high on our to-do list), all of my gift wrap, and what I call my memory boxes (basically plastic boxes filled with mementos). As I was sitting on the floor amid all of this stuff, I realized that I had a huge closet in the Twilight Room, sitting there basically empty.

In April and May I got to work on the closet.. not as easy as you'd think, seeing as it was covered in hand prints.

Once that was done, I started filling it up. That didn't take long. But I managed to unpack almost every box left in the Guest Room! Plus all of the boxes that I had accumulated in the Twilight Room.

The walls weren't that bad. Two coats of the light yellow paint, over two coats of Kilz covered all of the stripes. There are still a couple spots where you can see a little raised line (whoever painted the stripes taped off the lines and there are some spots where there's a raised line of paint along where the tape was), but only if you look really really close. The trim and windows were a pain because the paint was so dark and I was painting it white. I'm still not 100% done with the doors... they're taking an obnoxious amount of paint!!

Over the summer I moved in some furniture I had in the Guest Room. We got R's childhood bed and I had to rearrange the Guest Room, and all of the furniture didn't fit any more. I moved in his old bookcase and  Madison's papasan chair. We also have an old filing cabinet in here that was left in the house. It's broken and not very eye-pleasing, but it's too heavy for me to move out of the room, let alone down the stairs, so it's staying in here until it bothers R enough to move it (it'll be here for awhile).

In the fall I bought some Ikea curtains for the room. The next time R went to use his computer, he was like "What is all of this? What happened to my office? There are flowery curtains and stuffed animals in here!" It had definitely gone from being his room to mine.. My craft supplies take up one whole wall, there are stuffed animals on the shelves there and on the puppy's papasan chair.. there are flowers on the walls and curtains and there are pink stripped tie-backs on the curtains. His wall does have a nice panoramic view of Fenway (I said, if this was my room I definitely wouldn't have hung THAT up!) and all of his books and CDs and This Old House magazines, etc. by his computer still :)

The room still isn't completely finished (what is in this house?). I haven't painted the ceiling yet and we're planning on getting a new carpet soon. I plan on painting the ceiling and touching up the base trim when we get the new carpet. I also need to finish the doors and install the re-painted hardware.

**Picture disclaimer** I broke our camera. Our good, fancy camera. So these pictures are blurry and not the best (after waiting so long to take them you'd think they'd at least be good!). Sorry.

Madison's corner of the room. It's her favorite spot to sleep.

All that's left of R's space in the room

Bought these frames and pictures at Ikea for a total of $3.  I spray painted the frames black to match everything else in the room.

Curtains from Ikea with ribbon tie-backs. I spray painted the existing curtain rods black.

Weekend of Craziness #1

As you know, we have a Kitchen deadline. I made a schedule. It's taped to the cabinets in the Kitchen, to taunt us.

This weekend was Weekend #1. And it was pretty crazy. On the schedule for this weekend was "Finish the drywall in the Kitchen (under the windows and on the beams), patch/sand the drywall, install the window casing, paint the Living Room and finish the beadboard backsplash".

I was pretty angry last week because we went on a vacation/business trip (which is why we didn't get any work done last weekend) to Minnesota and when we got back I had a TON of work to catch up on. Which meant that I didn't have time to finish the paint removal in the Living Room. (Not angry about the trip, which was amazing... angry that I didn't get to finish everything in time..) So before the weekend started we were already behind (I was going to have my SILs paint all the Living Room trim and woodwork).

But, we still managed to get a lot done. Not everything on the schedule, but still a lot.

By the end of the weekend, we managed to get the drywall up on one vertical beam (only one left to go!), and under the windows. The fireplace got two more coats of paint, plus the cabinet door got painted. The casing of the door opening between the Hall/Living Room and Kitchen got painted. The casing of the Dining Room opening got painted. 80% of the walls got patched, sanded and primed. The disconnected electrical outlet from under the windows got removed. The door to the stairs got scraped and taken down. The chicks got updated nesting boxes (they destroyed the ones I put in a couple weeks ago.. the new ones are screwed into the shelf.. they're Gladys-proof!). And the lawn got cut (it looked like we had a lawn service.. two lawn mowers going at once!).

Pretty successful weekend, even though we didn't finish everything on the schedule. We did do some stuff that was on there on other days though, so I think it evens out. I don't mind that the Living Room didn't get done. That was my fault, because of Minnesota and work. Couldn't be avoided. And the Living Room technically isn't part of the Big Schedule of October 2011. So who cares. It can be done in November.

We could have definitely gotten more done if we had been home last weekend to do some of this. We had 2 (3 on Saturday) extra helpers, but most of the time we didn't have any work for them because we had to wait for other stuff to happen first. Like, if we could have done the drywall and sanding, and/or the window trim last weekend, they could have helped me paint it all this weekend.

I have to say though... on Saturday we were all amazed by the Hall/Living Room opening casing.. it being white now (as opposed to half stained, half plain wood like it has been) made a huge difference! But that was nothing compared to white, primed walls by Sunday afternoon! It finally looks like we're almost there!

And on top of all that, we managed to go to two fairs, watch TV, have a nice big breakfast and wash and put away all the dishes from the whole weekend. We're pretty awesome :)

Bedroom Closet

Our Master Bedroom has two closets, which is two more than most houses the age of ours. One is original, one was added probably in the 50's. The original one is located between the chimney and stairs and is about 7' deep and 30" wide. Before we even moved in, I told R this would be his closet. The other closet is a more "normal" size, about 30" deep and 6' wide. I hang most of my clothes up, plus need a lot of storage, so that closet became mine. I painted/cleaned my closet in October of last year, because I couldn't stand living out of boxes (I'm one of those people who need to see all their clothes in order to choose one). R, however, was perfectly content with his clothes in boxes. Because he didn't care, cleaning and painting his closet kept moving farther and farther down on my list of things to-do. In July I had finally had enough. We were about to go on vacation and I hate leaving the house messy when we're away (it's one of those things my mom ingrained in my head when I was little... you never want to go away and come home to a messy house). I had finally had enough of the boxes of clothes piled up in our bedroom.

It ended up not being as bad as I originally though. Only 1 dead spider and no huge cracks in the walls that needed repairing. All in all, I finished in two days (and I didn't spend all day working.. basically just the afternoons). The first day I spent cleaning out everything we had accumulated in there (boxes, suitcases, misc. stuff we weren't using and didn't have another place for), patching holes in the walls, and painting some of the trim. The second day I painted the door, ceiling, shelves and walls.

Luckily it was a very dry day, so the paint dried incredibly fast and I was even able to organize all of R's stuff in the closet before he came home!

The closet has 2 shelves in the back (about 24" deep). One these I put some long-term storage, pillows, and some of Ryan's stuff that he rarely uses. Underneath the bottom shelf (which is about 3' off the floor) I put our large suitcase and filled it with all of our dufflebags, backpacks, etc., so now when we're packing to go somewhere everything is in one place. On top of that I put our big, thick winter comforter in it's bag. (That's another thing I'm very excited to have a place for... It's white and light blue, and when it's too hot we've just been kicking it onto the floor. It basically spent the whole summer on the floor which means it got dirty from the floor and from the dog that decided that it was a new big huge bed we bought for her). Along the walls are old hooks which I was originally going to replace, but then decided just to paint them. I hung R's belts and ties on them.

Because the closet is so incredibly deep, there are 2 hanging rods. This would not have worked for me because I need to see all of my clothes. For R though, perfection! On the back rod I hung all of his winter clothes and on the front rod, all of his summer clothes! So now when he's looking for something, they're organized so he's not looking through sweatshirts for a polo shirt, but also if we have a cold early fall day, he still has the option to grab a long sleeved shirt if he wants. It also means that season-changing will be easier because rather than spending a whole day unpacking and packing clothes (like I do for my clothes), all I have to do is switch which rod they're hanging on.

The floor in front is open for laundry baskets and other misc. items like our large bed pillows if we're not using them. And yes, every single item from that first picture (in the closet and surrounding it) is all in here... I fit it all :-D

Another Coat of Shady Grove

I FINALLY put the second coat of paint on the Guest Room walls today! Almost 10 months after the first coat got put on! R's sisters painted the first coat back in September last year, the weekend before we moved in. Things of course got crazy and over the next couple weeks the room became a storage room for boxes and furniture that belonged in rooms I was in the middle of painting. My Office finally got painted and the Guest Room got emptied out a bit. Once the Twilight Room was finished I was able to unpack almost all of the boxes. We had to set up my bed and push things out of the way every once in awhile when we had guests, and because furniture had been moved in and set up, I never got around to doing that second coat. Over Fourth of July weekend we brought R's childhood bed down from Massachusetts. I was about to set it up last week when I realized that now is the time to finally finish up this room! And it took me only a couple hours.

It has been really hot here all week and actually this worked in my favor. The paint dried extremely fast! I would move a piece of furniture out from the wall, paint that wall, move on to the next section, and by the time I had to move the furniture out of my way, I was able to put it back in it's place. Despite the heat (and constant breaks for water), I finished in about 3 hours. And that included all of the furniture moving and a small ant issue (Last summer while I was painting, I noticed a lot of carpenter ants coming out of this room into my Office. Couldn't figure out where they were coming from though. Today I figured it out and gave it a good spraying of my handy new bug killing spray. Bye bye ants.). The room isn't completely cleaned and set up yet, but here are some pictures of it with some furniture and a complete paint job. (Ignore the boxes, mess and fact that one bed doesn't have a mattress on it)

A Hodgepodge of Work

June has been a very busy month for us. Nothing huge got completed. We did do a little bit here and a little bit there though.

Every weekend since Memorial Day has either been filled with family obligations, rain or very humid weather. So really no change on the back sidewalk, other than yesterday. I spent a couple hours in the afternoon digging out the grass in the area where the sidewalk will be.

I finished painting the Twilight Room... I just need to get in there and take some pictures now. It rained for days after I finished painting it so I used those days to move some furniture in and unpack some boxes.. which means it's now a mess and not ready for pictures.

Yesterday morning I spent about an hour weeding our front walk. It's something that kept getting ignored because everyone knows to use our back door, not the front. So the sidewalk has been unseen and forgotten. It looks a lot nicer now... like someone actually lives here. I'm too embarrassed to show a picture of what it looked like before! Yea, it's nothing special now and will be replaced sometime in the future, but at least it's not overgrown anymore. While I was weeding I did get to enjoy a little show. I heard a ton of sirens at the end of the street and a couple seconds later about 15 state police motorcycles came down the street, followed by about 10 EMS motorcycles. Then about 50 (most likely more) more motorcycles came down the street. It was a huge motorcycle parade. Not sure where they were going. One guy's motorcycle broke down right in front of our house, so he and a bunch of his friends were out there for awhile trying to fix it. In the end another guy came and loaded the bike into his truck.

We've also been working on the drywall in the Kitchen (good rainy day work). Because everything is so un-level in the house it's tough to work on the drywall... do we make it straight or do we keep it un-level like everything else? The sanding is the worst thing in the world.. sanding takes place on the weekends, but during the week I need my Kitchen to cook in. Which means that I have to move everything out of the Kitchen on the weekends and then back in on Monday morning. It's getting old.

We also finally chose our Kitchen floor, which is exciting! Hopefully we'll be buying that soon!

I've also been busy doing some unpacking. And by unpacking I mean filling up the Twilight Room closet with all of my office stuff. I came to the conclusion yesterday that I don't think I'll ever in my life need to purchase any pens or pencils.. I have more than enough for a small country.

We also discovered why the Kitchen fireplaces turns into a waterfall every time it rains. Turns out the cover over the chimney broke during the winter and has a huge huge hole in it.

Hand Prints and Lemonade

Today was the first nice day in about 2 weeks. It has been raining and cloudy every.single.day. Which has been good and bad. Good because I sit down at my laptop and work all day. Bad because I haven't been able to get any painting in.

I decided to paint the Twilight Room closet because it is a huge closet where I could be storing all of my excess office supplies, which are still in boxes. It took me almost all morning to clear out the boxes from the area, and then clean the closet (vacuuming and Clorox wiping). 

I then put two coats of Kilz 2 Primer on the walls, door, shelf and ceiling. I used two coats because the dark colors of the hand prints showed through very clearly through only one coat. And there were hand prints everywhere! The Kilz also took care of the weird smell that the closet had (I'm assuming it's from being shut for so long).

Once that dried, I painted the shelves, trim and ceiling with my favorite white paint. For the walls I used Benjamin Moore Lemonade, which we had leftover from our apartment painting days (same as the other rooms... paint calculator told us to get 2 cans, we didn't even use half of one can). I normally would have painted closet walls white, but I had more yellow paint than white, so I figured I might as well use it. It means that if we ever change the wall color I'll have to paint the closet as well, but hey, it's yellow. It'll cover easily. It wasn't easy painting a 7' tall, 23" deep closet, with a 14" shelf and a lightbulb hanging down from the ceiling. My neck and arms were killing me by the end of the day and I was covered in paint.

I was very happy with how it came out. The yellow looks much better here than it did in the apartment. Less neon-y. And it definitely looks a lot better than the hand prints!

Mirror Refurbished

The previous owner left the mirror in the upstairs bathroom. It was old and ugly.. stained brown, with the wood chipping and peeling from being in the bathroom for so long. And the back was covered in paper, which was disintegrating. But, we needed a mirror in there.

I found one at Ikea that I liked and that matched the glass shelf and candle holders in the bathroom (the picture is the shelf, not the mirror... apparently they discontinued the mirror. It was only $20 though). However, when we were actually in the store, R hated it. Not sure why. He just did. So I didn't buy it. That was months ago. The mirror had been taken off the wall when I was painting and rather than hang it back up (and resign to the fact that it was staying), we had it propped up on the counter.

Back in December I tried painting it white, just to see what it would look like. With a coat of primer and a coat of paint, the stain still bled through. And you could see the cracking. It looked horrible. So now rather than just an ugly mirror, we have an ugly mirror that is half painted white.

Finally I had had enough of it. The rest of the bathroom is done except for the stupid mirror. I took it outside, put newspaper and painters tape over the glass and spray painted it black. And I have to say, I love how it came out! It looks almost identical to the Hemnes mirror from Ikea, which I liked, but was $50.

Painting the Laundry Room

Every time I'm in our local Lowe's I check out their clearance section. So far, I've bought two cans of paint there. Both cans are premium Valspar brand paint... originally $35, on sale for $5. One of these I decided to use for the upstairs back hall (the other one is a yellow I'm planning on using in the Kitchen).


I started by filling in holes and sanding the walls (the paper left behind a weird, rough texture), then moved on to the trim and doors. I painted the trim and doors the same white I've been painting the rest of the trim/doors in the house. I love how white trim instantly cleans up a room! I also find that it accentuates the detailing in the trim (especially in some of the intricate crown molding we have in some rooms) much better than the dirty cream color did.


The walls and trim took about 2 coats of paint each. At first I wasn't too sure about the color on the walls. I'm not a "brown" person. I don't like brown clothes or brown walls. But this brown (it's called Moose Mousse) works for me. It makes the room look sophisticated, if you can call a Laundry Room sophisticated.

The hardest part of the room was the wall cabinet. It took a couple coats of paint and took longer to dry. But I did find about 6 bottles of body wash (unopened.. still in their gift packaging) and a really nice winter/Christmas hand soap set from Bath and Body Works. Looks like someone received all of these as Christmas gifts and just left them in the cabinet; either didn't want them, or forgot about them. And the best part? I also found a $20 Borders gift card tucked into one of the gift bags. It looked like whoever received it never even noticed it was there! Yay for free books!!

Fabric Bulletin Board

Have a bulletin board that needs a quick remodel? We had two. When we were young, my mom made bulletin boards for my sister and me. She bought just your average bulletin board and painted them with our name and some pictures (I had hearts and my sister had flowers). As amazing as the bulletin board is, it just didn't fit in our new house. Plus, R had a plain (boring) bulletin board from his room at home. It looks, well, like it lived in a boy's room for 20-odd years. It was not pretty. But I can't just throw stuff away. So from apartment to apartment it sat in the closet. Then when I remodeled my office, I realized that the two walls on either side of the windows would be perfect for matching bulletin boards. But they'd need to match. And both be hung horizontally (the one my mom made had to be hung vertically). So in about an hour I transformed them.

The first step was to fine something to cover the cork with. To save some money, I first decided to look through fabric I already had and hope to God that I had something that not only matched the walls but also would fit both boards. I tried a couple different colors, but eventually settled on this pink. Not only did the color look perfect with the white trim and blue-ish walls, but it kinda sort matches my new Ikea lamps!

The next step was to take the frame off of the bulletin boards. Seems simple enough, right? WRONG. The frame is held together by these crazy looking zig-zag pieces of metal which do not want to come out! Nothing I did made them budge a millimeter! I tried a hammer (in many different ways), pliers, a staple remover... Eventually I got just a little frustrated and just started hammering away on the thing. I broke off a chunk of the back of the frame, just enough so that I could get the hammer in there and smack that stupid zig-zag out of there!

Because I was worried about breaking the frame beyond all repair, this is as much as I took apart. I gently slid the cork out of the frame and left the rest of the frame corners intact. Then I painted the frame front and sides using two coats of white paint.

While the paint was drying, I ironed the fabric like crazy. I cut each piece about 2 or 3 inches larger than the front of the board. I started at a shorter side and after making sure that the fabric was centered (to be sure I'd have enough overhand on each side), I stapled it to the back of the board. I put a staple every 3 or 4 inches or so. I then moved on to the other short side, then the two longer sides, making sure to pull the fabric as tightly as possible before stapling. This is very important because it would be very noticeable if the fabric isn't straight or tight.

All that's left is to reattach the frame, which is much much easier than removing the frame. Time start to finish? Including waiting for the paint to dry, about 2 hours. I love the new bulletin boards! They look perfect in the room! Now I just need to find stuff to hang on them! Total cost? $0.00!

 

See it next to the lamp? I love it!!

 

The new bulletin boards also inspired me to clean up my desk and bit and unpack some more office boxes.

Kitchen Built-in Hutch

This week my goal was to finish this hutch. I realized that I have about 10 boxes of Kitchen stuff that I can unpack into this hutch. I also have a ton of Christmas stuff that I want to put up here. So starting on Sunday, I've spent every available second sanding, priming, and painting.

The hutch was originally stained, so I used a couple coats of Kilz 2 to cover it, then 2 coats of white paint. I hadn't realized before, but the cabinet goes up all the way to the ceiling... even though the trim is about 12" below the ceiling. It was pretty difficult to get up in that space. But I also realized that it would be the perfect spot for some lighting to illuminate the whole hutch. Someday..

I originally wanted to replace the wood paneling in the back of the cabinet with beadboard to match the backsplash, but now that it's painted, you don't notice it as much. It actually looks pretty nice. And luckily for me, the doors and shelves all came out very easily, so it made everything a little bit easier to paint.

We decided to keep the original hardware. It's very unique, and I think it fits better with the house than anything else we'd find. But when I went to put it back on the newly painted cabinet, I realized it needed some help. When a very thorough cleaning didn't make much improvement, I decided to spray paint them. I painted them black and they look brand new!

I love how it all came out! Now we just need to get the rest of the trim/casing and walls painted in the Kitchen... As beautiful as the hutch looks, it's a little out of place in the rest of the construction zone that is my Kitchen :)

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???

My Office

I am always on my computer. Whether it's working on house designs, work, blogging, or just for fun, I'm always using it. In our old apartment my office consisted of my laptop and the couch. In our guest bedroom I had a table set up with some of my craft supplies, but that was such a multi-purpose room, the table was always covered with other stuff.


The day we first viewed this house, I fell in love with this room and knew it would someday be my office. 

It was perfect! It has a central location, beautiful view out the windows, a built-in bookcase and a fireplace! And it's the only room in the house that has the potential for lots of bookcases. The only downside is that it was pretty dark and ratty looking. Even without the curtains on the windows, it was dark. 

Luckily the wallpaper came off pretty easily. A helper and I took it all down in about 2 hours. We peeled off the grass layer, and then using spray bottles got the bottom layer wet, which made it peel right off. The walls underneath were pretty disgusting though. Aside from the wall with the windows, they were all newer drywall (when I say newer I mean from the '50's), but were stained and had a lot of holes. The wall to the left of the windows (seen in the next picture) was very poorly installed, and was very squishy.

We originally thought the wallpaper in this room was going to be the hardest in the house. The grass was so thick, and at first, didn't peel off nicely. But then we had the pleasant surprise of it being a piece of cake. Well, it came back to bite me when I started to paint. Before painting each wall I had to first wash it down with TSP, then sand the little bits and pieces of wallpaper left behind, then wash it again, then fill in the holes with putty, then sand again. THEN I could paint.

I decided to paint the trim, beams and fireplace surround a nice bright white. I love rooms with natural light, and the lighter the colors, the more reflective the light is. I used Glidden Semi-Gloss White. I made the mistake of not using any primer. The trim color didn't seem dark enough that I would need it. It took 4 or 5 coats of white to cover the yellowy-tan color. The paint on the beams was peeling and needed to be sanded, but I was a little worried it was lead paint. We bought a $9.95 lead paint test (good for 3 tests) at Home Depot, and it came out negative.

The color I chose for the walls is Lowe's La Fonda Mirage. It doesn't photograph 100% accurately, but it looks great in the room. Especially with the natural light shining on it. Because the wall underneath wasn't white (more of an off-white tan color with stains), in some areas it took two coats, but not everywhere. I was very impressed by the paint. The only downside was that because it took so long to prepare the walls and paint the trim (which I needed to do before painting the walls), I waste a lot of paint. I used up the entire gallon of paint on this tiny room and I still wasn't done! But luckily Lowe's sells those small sample bottles of paint, so I got two of those and only ended up needing half of one.

We still need to paint behind the radiator, but I skipped that for now because we're planning on having the radiator replaced because it leaks. A lot. The wall behind the radiator still has old wallpaper, which was on the walls before the grass wallpaper. We can't get behind it without disturbing the already leaking radiator. But for now, I just put my table in front of it and you hardly notice it.

The room is far from being finished (I need bookcases, more tables, filing cabinets, curtains, a rug, stuff on the walls...), but it's my favorite room in the house so far. I often find myself staring at the room from other rooms.. I just love it, especially in the morning! I didn't get a chance to clean the fireplace yet (there's a lot of smoke damage, and about $10 in pennies, inside the fireplace), but just the trim being repainted makes it looks so much cleaner and fresh.