The Big Reveal

When we first visited our home back in February it was pretty much love at first sight. At that time it was like we were just starting to "date" our house. The relationship was extremely new and we didn't get to see each other as often as we would have liked. We even got a little desperate at times and did drive-bys just to be reminded of what the house looked like. Everything was bright, shiny, and new and the relationship was blossoming. Then we made a big commitment to the house and things jumped from tentative to extremely serious in a matter of days. Our courtship ended as quickly as it had began and now we find ourselves in a life-long commitment to it (literally!) As with all relationships, we were beginning to get nit-picky and we were noticing things we didn't notice before. After all, it was love at first sight. It didn't take long before little things we just brushed off before started to really bother us. That brings us to the beginning of the first hurdle in our relationship... The Living Room.

As corny as that may have seemed, I couldn't have come up with a more appropriate way to describe our feelings about our home. We truly love it and could not be happier, but not everything is perfect so we really have to work to get things to the way we want them. The living room walls were such a disaster.
They were covered in this awful texture that seemed like a cross between stucco and popcorn ceilings. I couldn't quite pinpoint what it was. Not that it matters though because whatever it was, it wasn't going to be staying long.
The project first started back when I was in AZ for a visit. We hadn't even moved in yet so Glenn and Janke decided to work on the living room, but not before tarping up every possible opening in the room.

They spent a long day scraping the walls, learning tricks and techniques along the way. Sadly, this project did not turn out to be a weekend project, but rather an eight weekend project.
From the tales I heard over the phone, it was an extremely arduous and exhausting day for the both of them. I'm still impressed with what a good friend Janke is. We're lucky to have him as a friend.
We didn't spend every weekend working on it. In fact, we didn't mess with it for a while. I took a stab at it for the first time one day while Glenn was at work. I barely made any progress despite working for a couple hours and I was quickly discouraged. The particular wall that I chose to work on happened to be the worst wall in the room.
The texture was so stuck that if we scraped anymore, we ended up pulling up the wall! You can see lots of brown, cardboard looking spots in many of the pictures. That's where the scraping went a little too far and we started gouging the wall.
Time went by and we finally decided to work on it again. I was all set to go and determined that we were going to finish that day.
Scraping makes a HUGE mess. This picture is actually an example of what the texture looks like when it is cooperating and coming off fairly nicely. It didn't do that very often. It's nearly impossible to contain, even with tarps covering the floor and every entrance. That dust is just a nightmare.
It's incredible how difficult and labor intensive this project actually was. On our final day of scraping we were both so sore we could barely move.
We were covered head to toe in dust. Glenn's gray hair and my blonde hair ended up looking about the same color by the end of the day. It was very frustrating trying to keep the rest of the house clean while I tracked dusty white footprints everywhere.
I was certainly not prepared for all of that work. I wanted to cry from being so sore. After we were done scraping we admired our handiwork and stepped away from the mess for a while before returning to patch some seriously big holes and clean up the disaster zone.
Before we were able to continue we needed to caulk all of the edges between the walls and the trim. It was my first experience with a caulking gun. It was pretty easy to use but it did take me some time to get even lines.

The next step was to cover the walls in joint compound. Maybe this is not the proper way to do it and we probably should have just hung new drywall but this was the route we chose and no one was going to tell us otherwise.
It took us a while to get a good rhythm going but we finally covered the walls. It took us a couple days. Our major mishap along this portion of the project was my pouting. After working so hard to cover a wall I noticed that huge cracks were beginning to creep up and down the walls. I was truly upset by this and thought that all of our hard work was wasted. Glenn tried really hard to explain that everything would be okay, but I was just not having any of that. It took me some time but I finally got over it and we were able to continue later.
Buckets of joint compound later, we were nearing the finish line. It was finally time to sand down the walls. Glenn insisted that sanding down the cracks worked just fine. He demonstrated on a particularly nasty crack and I watched it disappear. Satisfied with the results, I started sanding as well. Thankfully sanding was not the most difficult task but it was one of the messiest. At this point we had given up hope of maintaining clean floors while we worked in the living room and we just did our best to make an effort to contain the mess.

It wasn't until I was preparing to prime the walls that I noticed something was amiss. I decided that the best way to get the remaining dust of the walls without using water was to vacuum the walls. It worked great. So great, in fact, that it sucked the dust right out of the cracks we thought we were sanding down. Apparently we were just sanding dust right into them and filling them. I was so over it at this point that I didn't even care and I just finished what I was doing. Luckily I was able to find the humor in it this time around and I started priming the walls. Glenn got home from work and helped me finish.
Looking at the walls all clean and smooth and white was certainly a sight for sore eyes. We had something that resembled a normal room with normal walls! You wouldn't believe how good it felt to see (mostly) finished walls after all this time. What a relief!

With the walls primed and the room cleaned it was time for the final step. Color! I really enjoy painting but my last experience painting in this house did not end so well. Between a disaster of a gallon of paint splattering everywhere and paint bleeding through my very thorough taping job I was less than enthusiastic about painting this time. I was resolved to do something different, to do something I had never done before. I was going to paint an entire room without taping anything. Of all the shows I have seen on HGTV, I have seen them use painter's tape maybe once or twice. Well if the professionals who get paid to paint can do it, well then so can I!
I watched a handful of tutorials on youtube about how to "cut-in" while painting and decided that I was ready. It took me about 2-3 hours to edge the entire room but I did a pretty awesome job considering I don't really have any perfectly straight surfaces. I was very pleased with myself.
The color on our walls is a beautiful gray called Flagstone by Olympic Paint. Glenn actually chose the color after I gave him some parameters and I was really impressed for someone who claims to not see differences in shade. I just love the color in the room and I think it is absolutely beautiful. While some people go for tans, beiges, and off whites for their neutrals it is all about the gray for me.
I've been surprised at how difficult it is to choose paint colors! We currently have 6 different color swatches in the kitchen right now. I never thought Glenn and I were indecisive about color, but then I realized that the condo in Phoenix had so few walls to paint! Naturally it would be a little overwhelming to have to choose colors for so many walls. We're doing fine though.
After painting the walls a lovely shade of gray we were left with a couple nasty reminders of the previous life the living room once had. Sitting in strategically placed locations were big ugly electrical boxes with outdated switches and switchplates. That was going to change.
After a couple trips to ReStore and Lowe's we were able to round up a nice clean white set of outlets, switches, and covers. Glenn taught me how to install a switch and I managed to not electrocute myself. The same cannot be said for him however. Don't worry though, he's fine. We quickly replaced everything and marveled at how ugly all those outlets and switches really were.
With our walls painted, outlets and switches matching, and some new draperies hung (excuse the inappropriate, too short length of the curtains) we often find ourselves standing in the middle of the room smiling at our work. It has been an extremely long and difficult journey but we made it through and could not be happier or more proud.