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. 

I may have gotten a little caught up with house stuff and a little behind on the blog stuff. Here are some (not so fantastic) before and after pictures of what we’ve been up to – which is mostly ripping off wood paneling and some minor demolition of cabinets. Please ignore any glimpse of my messy house, we’ve been living in a construction zone. Also, that fuzzy mutt in (almost) every picture would be Faye, she likes to watch me work.

This would be the before all of the wood paneling in the blue room, I used a panoramic to get it all in so the room looks a bit skewed.

Blue room after – it already looks so much brighter! Yes, I know I missed a panel, I was having some minor electrical issues with the thermostat that was on that panel (and by issues I mean I had no clue how to disconnect it and had to wait for Casey to get home to help).

Yellow room before. This picture was taken after we ripped out the bed frame, that was built in before they installed carpet. The frame was too big for me to move by myself, so it’s still hanging out in the room until we get some extra man power.

Yellow room after, another instance of me not knowing how to disconnect the thermostat. For the record, I can now disconnect and reconnect the thermostats all by myself.

This is the built in cabinet that was in the yellow room. The doors/fronts were taken off when we had the asbestos removed from the ceilings. Similar to the bed frame, this was completely built in. Nailed to the walls and floor, and a true pain in the ass to rip out.

This might not be the best after picture with all of the bed frame components stacked against those walls, but it’s the best I have for now.

There you have it! I’ll be posting again this week with the before and after wood paneling pictures from the dining room and living room, and some before and after of the living room demolition. I’ll bitch about the damage to the dry wall, and how we plan to (hopefully) fix it later.