Guest Room Adventures

Remember how I said that the ultimate goal of moving my brother into a new bedroom was to ultimately convert his old room to a guest room?

Well, we got him moved out just in time for me to move in. Mr. Cheddar is off in training halfway across the state, and until he signs the lease on our oh-so-nerve-wracking fixer-upper, I am staying behind with Lucy. 

So while I'm sleeping on an air mattress, it's my job to get that guest room up and running to the best of my abilities.

If you remember from my last post, this is how the room started out:

I wasn't even able to get into the room to get different angles of the "before" pictures. It was mess-ay!

Shane cleaned up the room while Kara painted the entertainment center and I painted Shane's new bedroom. It got to around this point:

And then my mum got fed up and said she would finish the rest. Really, it had just become a case of watching Shane push piles of stuff around the room and calling it "cleaning." At least we could see the floor again.

(If you look closely, you can see Nemo on the bed as well as Tigger and Maximus [Tangled] on top of the white shelf in the corner. He also had Stitch, Perry the Platypus, and Pikachu somewhere in that room.)

So the four of us emptied shelves, filled garbage bags, gingerly peeled down Shane's drawings, and packed most of this stuff tightly into the walk-in closet. Then we started disassembling the bunk bed.

That bunk bed has been around since my brother and I shared a room. It's solid wood. High quality. But it's unnecessary now that there are only two kids left in the house, and they both have their own rooms, so into the storage unit it went. (Looking back, I'm surprised my mum didn't get a little emotional over this. She was probably concentrating too much on making progress on the room to feel sentimental.)

Oh, and remember me talking about the stickers on the fan blades?

Yeah, we still haven't come up with a solution for those. We peeled off a couple and they left star-shaped residue.

After a couple hours of work, we got the room looking like this:

We permitted ourselves a dinner break (we always have to have "real" dinners whenever my dad is home, luckily we had anticipated this break in momentum) but got right back to work afterwards. This bookshelf in the corner:

We emptied it and detached it from the wall, only to find that it was rickety. If it hadn't been bolted to the wall, it would've fallen over sideways. Mum had grand plans to repurpose that shelf into a cookbook stand in the kitchen one day, but those dreams were dashed.

So it was taken apart and put into a stack for the curbside. It's the only piece of furniture that seemed too unsafe to reuse.

Some of the furniture couldn't come out of the room yet, since we are short on furniture-storing space in this house. The tall particle board cabinet is also going by the curbside this week, it has a lot of wear and tear on it and we have no use for it anymore. Hopefully an intrepid driver snatches it up before it has to go to the dump.

The desk is going into Shane's room once all the repainting is done. The black one will be moved into the guest room. And the bookshelf is staying, because if my mum has one weakness, it's books.

So the remaining furniture was put into the middle of the room:

And that's when we called it a night. My sleeping situation?

Ahh, the air mattress. Takes me right back to my college days. Except my shoulders really disagree with it now! (It's only been three years since I've had to sleep on it! What gives, shoulders?)

The next day, I woke stiff and sore bright-eyed and bushy tailed, ready to take on the built-in shelves and spackling. First I had to take a trip Mum's workplace to pick up boxes, then to Home Depot, just to peruse the Behr and Martha Stewart paint samples. I ended up standing at the counter for almost an hour waiting for three paint samples to be mixed. And I was the least grumpy customer they had to deal with. Even though it put a dent in my day, I ended up feeling a lot worse for the four frazzled paint desk employees than I ever felt for myself.

Armed with my paint samples and a can-do attitude, I braved the third day of Tropical Storm Debby to make it home and find...

WOE. Forgive the crappy iPhone-quality picture. Apparently the red paint can was left on the floor right here and one of the dogs knocked it over. There is some disagreement over which dog it was (neither of the dogs had red paint on them, leading me to the obvious conclusion that the cat framed them both) and there was a lot of disagreement over who left the unsealed red paint can on the floor.

I took to Twitter (unwilling to spring this news on my mum via text message, and unable to ask my original go-to person for household crises, my dearly departed mother-in-law) and got tons of suggestions for how to get up this stain. Ultimately we broke into my brand-new bottle of acetone; my sister supplemented with her half-full bottle of acetone as well. After about three hours of scrubbing, holding our breath, and then leaning backwards to inhale, we got to this point:

Unfortunately, that's when the cloths stopped picking up yellow or red dye. We'd gotten up as much of it as possible. 

Mum came home and was surprisingly chipper about it. Kara was dreading her reaction, but Mum said what I was thinking all along: That carpet needs to be replaced anyway. It's original to the house, the carpet in the bedrooms is stained badly, and the carpet downstairs has already been replaced once in the past decade.

By then, it was five o'clock and Mum had errands to run with Kara, so I had to start dinner. I was set back at this point about eight hours from my original plan.

After dinner, I emptied the built-ins of the trophies and stuffed animals, then took them down. I decided not to spackle those because the parental figures still haven't decided if they want to keep the shelves in the guest room or not.

Spackling didn't start until around 9:00.

And MAN, did this room need spackling!

On the one hand, I was being extra-careful to find any holes and dents. This was going to be the room guests stayed in, and even with a fresh coat of paint, pockmarks aren't the best impression. I'm not on any sort of deadline with this project (besides the one I've set for myself) so I figured it was worth it to take my time and make sure to fill as many holes as possible. (Resisting urge to make a Michael Scott joke...)

On the other hand, both my sister Kathleen (who used to share this room with Kara) and Shane (who shared the room with Kara when Kathleen got her own room) have a predilection for sticking things into walls. Pictures, posters, hand drawings, index cards, and in Shane's case, streamers! Somewhere along the way, my mum got Shane to switch to painter's tape instead of tacks, but the damage was already done.

There were even pinholes only three inches up from the baseboard--what were they pinning up that low?

The spackling was the fun part--the sanding was not. This was a lot of sanding, and I was starting it around 11:00 that night, to the sound of heavy rainfall and wind gusts.

I had dreams of doing the primer that night, but at 12:45, I was exhausted.

I couldn't find Lucy anywhere in the house, and finally I checked Shane's room...

A boy and his sister's dog! Aww!

The next morning I threw a drop cloth over the furniture and prepared to primer. This is a glimpse of the walls post-spacking and pre-primer.

Well okay, I'd started the ceiling cutting in before I remembered to take pictures. But still.

The clouds were in both rooms because when Shane was born, Kara was moved into this bedroom along with her Winnie the Pooh decals. The clouds stayed in the small bedroom with the intent of my other brother making model airplanes for the clouds... which... never happened.

After two layers of trim were done, I had to help my mum move furniture to the storage unit. It was now day 4 of Debby and day 3 of painting the room, and the bunk bed was just sitting in the back of my dad's SUV taking up space. I didn't have time to wash out the roller tray, so I just set it in the rain to keep the paint from crusting over.

It filled up after only an hour.

Then it was time for the part I like the least--using the roller.

But I finished before bed and got some after-shots the next morning.

Man, this is a long post, and I haven't even gotten to the colors yet. So I'll do those tomorrow, since that entails about a billion more pictures.

Somehow, this room seems ten times more difficult than the other rooms I've done, I guess because a lot is riding on this one.

So come back tomorrow for a discussion of COLORS! (It'll be more fun than it sounds.)