Painting

What a week!  Hubby and I have had a terrible cold and I haven't had the time or the energy to post.  I did a despicable thing and BOUGHT a gift for someone last week as I was too sick and lackluster to make something.  I should be ashamed.  But it happens to the best of us once in a while, doesn't it?  Besides, it was a wedding for hubby's friends and I never know how much they will appreciate the handmade approach.  Sometimes they think its me being cheap (which it partially is, I will admit, but far from my main motivation) instead of me trying to be anti-consumerism and make them something beautiful and useful.  So this post got sidetracked pretty quickly.  My point was, nothing got done last week and I didn't have time to post what we did the weekend BEFORE. :-)

So, Hubby and I decided to dive right in and paint the nursery (which is still half my craft room, sorry baby).  It involved moving all the furniture and its overflowing contents (craft room, remember?) out and back in in the space of 2 days.  Yikes.  We had long ago picked out the colors and so we bought paint late that week to spur us into action.  Much to my dismay, hubby picked expensive paint, but oh well.  Its his way of nesting I suppose.  We used Benjamin Moore Aura paint in Key Lime and Lemon Meringue.  Sounds delicious.

First, we moved out all the contents of everything, then the actual furniture.  We also had to take all the hardware etc off the walls, which took a good long time in itself.  I was in charge of outlet and switchplate covers (read: easy).  Hubby did the shelving, curtains, and TV mount.  I had already taken out the guest bed, but we had to move out the mattress and box spring.  We decided to keep them since we plan to use it again in a few years and mattresses are an expensive investment!  So we bought plastic sheeting used for drop cloths and wrapped them up with duct tape.  Into the garage they went.  The only thing we couldn't move was a huge desk that required disassembling and taking off doors to move.  We used it as our "painting table" and left it in the center of the room.  As for everything else, what a mess in our living room!

Then, we decided to vacuum the walls with a shop vac rather than wash them.  I have always washed walls with water and a little ammonia in the past to make sure the paint sticks and there are no major goopy/greasy spots or anything, but since this was flat paint (not semigloss) and since hubby's place is practically spotless, I opted for the quick and easy solution.  Took care of all those nasty spiders and their homes, too.

Then, we masked.  and masked.  and masked.  We used a whole huge roll of painter's tape (the blue stuff) to go around all the doors and closet doors, air vents, ceilings, baseboards, and the huge window.  Just a note from me to you, I like leaving my tape sticking out on the baseboards instead of folding it down.  It catches drips when it sticks out.  everywhere else doesn't really matter, but because its on the ground, molding tends to get the worst of the drips.  it also allows a little margin to shove your dropcloths under.  We got a great little cosco stepladder that totally came in handy.  It was well worth the $50 at Ace.  Hubby did all the high painting while I did the low because he was afraid of me being on the stepladder.  Course, I did all the ceiling masking, but whatever makes him happy...  The paint wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good.

Green and Yellow meet. Coincidentally, also Packer colors. Indoctrination begins early in this house.

Since we didn't finish till about 12:30 that morning, the next day we came in to take a look.  We had gone thin in a few spots because the lighting was so bad, but all in all, it looked pretty darn good!  We had planned to do a second coat, but since it already looked pretty good, we decided it wasn't worth the effort for such a small gain in aesthetics.  The spots we went thin on were really low or really high on the wall anyway, and would either be hard to see from the floor or covered with furniture. So we stuck a fork in it!

We yanked off all the masking, put the hardware back on the walls, and cleaned up all the little spills and such.  We finally got to assemble our crib and put it in there as well.  Since I got it on craigs list and we had been storing it in the garage for a few months, it was dirty, so I spent a good long time cleaning the heck out of it.  I was a little obsessed, but hey, its my future offspring we are talking about here!  By this point, I was absolutely wiped out, and poor dear Hubby got stuck putting all the furniture and contents back in the room by himself.

Here is how it looks now.  Since we were sick I haven't put everything back in its proper place and we have nothing on the walls yet (including the shelves that used to be up because I want to move them, I just don't know where yet).  It still looks pretty good, though.  A little disheveled, but that will change with time (and then revert once baby is born no doubt).

Now to replace those curtains...