Productive

Apparently I'm  on a bit of a roll as far as catching up on really old tasks - after yesterday's successful paint dump I continued the trend today by painting the random naked wall in our basement.

When we bought our house it had clearly been recently painted, like so recently that it was really just for show. They did a pretty nice job and I love the colors in most of the house, but a few of the shortcuts were kind of annoying.

Case in point - the previous owners left the IKEA entertainment center that also may have been purchased just for staging (it still had pricetags on, so who knows). Here's a blurry photo from when we were looking at the house (read: this is not our stuff):

Not long after we moved in we upgraded our TV and had to take off the top of the unit.

Which exposed an 8' wall of paneling that had not been painted.

WTF?!?!

I didn't take a proper "before" photo, but you can get the idea from these Halloween snapshots - the offending wall is that dark brown monstrosity behind the TV. All the rest of the paneling in the basement is painted the same color as the post/beam.

 

Yeah, the painter decided that since the wall was covered by A MOVABLE PIECE OF FURNITURE, it didn't need to be painted to match all the other paneling surrounding the basement.

Thanks dude.

Isn't that sort of like not painting behind a couch? Or a picture frame?Sure, it's covered NOW, but it's highly probable that at some point that furniture will move and you just screwed the future owners.

Oh, right, that's us. So after several years of twitching with OCD as I tried to watch TV and was consumed by that horrible mismatched wall, I decided to take advantage of the paint I had leftover from the new bar and just get it done. (I also finished up painting the bar while I was at it!) I EVEN USED PRIMER! That's a significant amount of effort for me. I slopped a few times, as usual, but considering how I've come to loathe painting, half of an 8' wall wasn't too painful.

And I feel much better.

Not to mention I think that was the first time we vacuumed behind the TV in...forever. Eew!

Painting the Town

Do you ever decide, out of the blue, to check something off your to-do list that has been tacked near the bottom for a really long time? Like, perhaps, since 2008? Apparently I do.

When we moved into our house it was all freshly painted and the former owners had left the rest of the paint stacked neatly on a shelf tucked in the far corner of the basement. I think they did it to be nice, but let's face it - the chances of using any of that paint before it dried up, separated, or otherwise became unusable were slim. Not to mention it wasn't enough to really repaint with, just a few touch ups, and I'm not motivated enough to do that. But, since it was out of sight, it was mostly out of my mind, or at least tucked away on the periphery until today when I finally decided that one of TC & my big adventures would be finding the county hazardous waste drop off.

I had a growing stack of burnt out CFL bulbs taking up space, a little button battery, and a set of broken blacklight bulbs from the Wicked Wonderland Halloween Party (the first set of bulbs I got were shattered when someone cut me off in traffic and I had to slam on my breaks, sending them into my dashboard. So I'm probably poisoned from breathing in the debris, but I'm such  a good citizen I sealed them up in a plastic bag until I could find a safe way to dispose of the shattered remains). And then of course the paint. Over a dozen cans, none of which were ones I bought. Some of the colors I could match to various places around the house, and others must have been even older - in particular a dark brown I have definitely never seen around the house.

The wonders of SuperWhy on PBS distracted TC long enough for me to haul it all upstairs, and we only drove past the  drop off site 3X before we found it - but we were the only ones there and lickety split, a task that had been lingering for 4 1/2 years was done.

Feels nice :)

Goodbye mermaid wall decal

I am very slowly working on some household projects, one of which involves trading rooms with The Cupcake sometime before winter. The rooms are about the same size but will work better switched for a few (not extremely interesting) reasons, plus it will be a fun change, so I'm making a tiny bit of progress while I wait to win the lottery afford the necessary accoutrements. A few free things I was able to start with included taking down the mermaid wall decal that was over TC's crib: 

 

 

It was really cute for TC, but not really what we had in mind for our bedroom, so I took a deep breath and started peeling. It came up pretty easily, though there was no way to "save" it unless you were willing to spend hours - it stuck to itself and tore easily coming off. It also apparently took off some paint, as you can see all the tiny dots of teal on the final product below:

 

 

The particles of missing paint weren't even noticeable on the wall, except for one small area (under 2" square) that came off pretty significantly:

So it definitely wasn't at all reusable, but it was mostly removable. We're planning to repaint anyways, so no big deal. All in all, it went up and came down better than I thought it would. I would definitely do a decal again in the future.