Guest Room 1: Low-Hanging Fruit
This house is bigger than any house I’ve ever lived in. It’s old, it’s quirky, it’s large & in charge. Since buying a house and moving are so ridiculously expensive, a lot of our initial re-dos are cosmetic and quick, just to make certain things livable! I know all the purists out there are thinking “what are they DOING! Stop!” but hey, unless you want to start a renovation GoFundMe for us, this is how it will be for now. I’d love to rip up all the laminate and discover original wood flooring, restoring it to its former glory. For now though, we have to get this place livable so we can enjoy it, have people over when we’re allowed to socialize again, and then tackle certain projects one at a time down the road. Forgive us for some of these choices, but we’re doing the best we can with what we have now.
So back to Guest Room 1, the bedroom off the Dining Room. This was the room with all the subfloor. So much subfloor. So very nailed down. Since subfloor is just that, after the old carpet was gone, it was the best time to start on the other cosmetic fixes, like taking down the wallpaper border and painting. I got a steamer at Lowe’s soon after we moved in, and we decided this was the easiest to tackle since it was just a border. (Note that this house is fuuuuuulllllllll of wallpaper - Dining Room, Kitchen, Conservatory, West Wing Bedroom, West Wing Bathroom and the Study.) Wallpaper removal was one of the projects I was least looking forward to - the end result, yes, the process, no. So we got to it. Now this steamer is a piece of crap but it was one I could buy & take home that day, so it now lives here, being crappy and sputtery and pretty terrible. But we use it. It does work sorta.
The wallpaper border came off really easily (save this tidbit for later…we got SPOILED.) We finished that up in less than 45 minutes. I found some brand new gallons of paint in the Sunroom, cracked those open and the color was a fine tan. Fine because tan isn’t my first choice, but it’s also a very difficult color to nail. It can be too green, too pink, too brown. This one was just right. The Golidlocks of tan. I went for it. We got this room painted, new outlet plates installed and cleaned up before the carpet folks arrived!
