Before you get too excited, this room is far from finished. BUT, I have finished the walls (with the exception of a couple minor paint touch ups). I chose the second bedroom as a test room so I could make sure I could adequately fix the destroyed drywall and not have it look like a total hack job. Now that I’m pleased enough with the results I get to move onto fixing the walls on the rest of the house! Here is my test room, from beginning to now.
I know I’ve posted this picture before, but what’s a result picture without a before? This is what I started with in our second bedroom.
Another repeat from a previous post, but this was the “during” phase – after I had removed most of the wood paneling.
No more blue carpet! In order to salvage the drywall I had to take a razor blade and cut around most of the rips and tears to provide clean edges to work with. The wall on the right had the cutting finished, and was then primed with an oil based primer (which I will forever and always despise) to re-seal the drywall and prevent the joint compound from soaking in an wrecking the final product.
I may have been extremely busy and frustrated and completely neglected to take pictures after I had applied the joint compound to fill in the tears. I also skipped pictures of sanding said joint compound. I promise I’ll try to do better with the next room. This was after the cutting, priming, joint compound, sanding, and – after texturing. I have never textured drywall before, I don’t think I had ever even seen a hopper gun. The texturing is definitely not perfect, but it’s mostly consistent. 
Texture close-up!
Another instance of me skipping pictures. This is after the room was primed over the texture, but also after I started testing out colors. I may have been a little over excited to start with some actual colors!
I painted! The color here a shade lighter than the bottom sample color on the wall from beforehand, I decided that the first samples were too dark. The whole point was to modernize the room and add some brightness, I think choosing a color that was too dark would have totally wrecked that. This is Behr April Mist, and is so much nicer in person than it is in the picture. The lighting here made it seem too pastel, it’s bright but not overly pastel or girly.
Next step is moving onto fix the walls in the master bedroom. Once I have that completed (I’m already ready to add joint compound in there!) we will be installing carpets in both bedrooms. After carpet we are moving our existence into the bedrooms instead of the living room and then getting started on the main areas of the house.
I am trying to get my ass in gear so I can have this (mostly) done before the wedding in July. I also need to make adequate progress so I can not stress about the house while I’m out of town for IVF in June – way more on that later.
So there it is, my mostly complete test room with the walls that I managed to mostly salvage. Even though it took me ages to get done, I am ridiculously proud of myself and my new drywall skills.