Colorful Weekend

This weekend Chris and I decided to paint our bedroom. The previous owners left quite a mess on the bedroom walls. It looks like the walls had wallpaper, then the owners tried peeling it off and got tired halfway through and just painted over everything. You could see exactly where there was wallpaper because it would go from smooth to textured wall, to smooth again. You could even see the outline of the strips of wallpaper that were left on. After over a year of laying in bed and staring at the neutral colored texture mess, I decided we were going to do something about it. I asked Chris if, as a Christmas gift to me, we could paint the bedroom walls and take out the carpeting. The carpeting is a dark brown throwback to the 80's that I don't want to look at any more. There's hardwood underneath it, but I don't know what condition it's in. I guess we'll deal with that in a few weeks. One project at a time.

It took us a few weeks of working on peeling the wallpaper off the walls. We just worked on it whenever we had time. It was hard because the paper would leave behind a layer stuck to the wall and we'd have to use DIF to get it off. DIF is a wallpaper remover in a spray bottle. It took forever to peel all the tiny little slivers of wallpaper off, but we got most of it. Friday we started priming, and Saturday we finished priming the walls. Then Sunday we went to Walmart and got Kilz paint, which guarantees that you only have to paint one coat (they're right!). I picked out Josie blue, which dried a lot darker than I wanted it to, but it still looks much better than the other color, which was just a light tan (same color as our front porch...I think the previous owners actually used the same paint based on the peeling of our front porch). Here are some pictures of the process.

Primer up.

You can see there is a dark patch under the primer..that's tan paint that didn't have wallpaper under it. The places where it was just white with primer is where we had to peel wallpaper off. There were more places that we had to peel wallpaper off than not.

I wanted a steely blue..like a grayish blue I guess, but I like our color. It's very bright and doesn't really match the Christmas comforter on our bed, but I'm buying a bedroom set that will match the walls.

A few months ago Chris, Jamey, Troy, Ben, and I all attended Old Fashion Day, which is pretty much just a day that people go and set up booths around the courthouse in Benton, selling things they've made themselves. It's supposed to be handmade items, but I'm thinking the giant coloring book I bought for Ben wasn't handmade. It's great, though. What we're going to do is have our little family color a few pages each year around Christmas (the book is 'Twas the Night before Christmas). That way we can look back through the pages and see how old Ben was when he colored certain pages. I do something similar every time we go on an airplane somewhere. I have a sudoku puzzle book that I take with me and I make sure I complete at least one puzzle every time we go somewhere, then I date it and write our destination on it. I like to look back and see that the first time I wrote in the book was on a trip to Alaska when Chris and I were still in college, then our honeymoon, etc. Anyway, here are some pictures of Ben getting some major help coloring the first page of our Christmas coloring book.

I had paint on my sweatshirt from painting all weekend. We colored this on Sunday night.

Ben just sat on the page and let me move his hand. He only fought a little, when he was trying to eat the crayon and I wouldn't let him. He even drooled on this page so it's a little water damaged and crinkly in one spot. I traced his hand on the first page.

Yeah, it's a pretty big coloring book.

Here's a video of coloring. Chris did the thing where he takes pictures while he's recording, so it's really annoying.