Hallway update

I'm taking a break after finishing the bedroom in record time. While I was waiting for the poly to dry in the bedroom, I did manage to finish up the downstairs hallway. I hated the stupid, ugly orangeybrown door (seen below for reference). I didn't think I'd be able to paint it, because doors seem expensive to replace, but my father gave me the go-ahead after declaring the floors to be "more subtle in person."

 

 

 

I decided to continue the motif of the floor up the door, so I painted the mouldings to match the borders on the floor and used the same colours as I did on the floor. I was going for a sort of trompe l'oeil effect with the hallway continuing. The door gives a sort of weird forced perspective to the hallway. I really like how it looks now. Next step in this hallway is to paint the walls, which are really banged up and gross. It's not happening any time soon though, I'm on a break!

 

 

Before, During, and After

My room is complete! The floors are finished! Everything is moved in! Time to tell the facebookers!

 

 

 

 

Here's some pictures of how the room has changed. There's about a zillion more things in it than before I moved in, of course.

 

 

I don't miss the white walls (or ceiling) at all!

 

 

 

Moving Day!!!!!!!

I've been running around like Mrs. Frisby all day getting ready to move my stuff back into the bedroom. I got most of the closet filled up yesterday while the poly was still technically drying. It is not likely to ever be this clean again.

First order of business, hanging curtains. This immediately made the room wonderfully dark. Which is a pain for pictures, but generally my favourite thing about the redo.

 

Next up, the bed. I got help moving it this time, which was sooo much better than wrestling with it myself. The bed is way too big for this room, and I was hoping to move where it lives now that the wall heater is out, but for one reason or another none of the alternate configurations worked, so its going back where it was.

 

 

 

And the horrible mattress from hell got put in next. 

 

I spent the rest of the day moving stuff out of the living room and back into the bedroom. Tonight, we sleep in peace! Pharaoh is already readjusting to his new-old home

 

 

 I took photos from each corner of the room, because again... never be this clean again. My phone's camera doesn't like the dark though, even with the flash. I took these pictures around noon on a sunny day, with the lights on and the curtains of one window open...

 

 

 

 

In which I take decorating advice from a stone.

I woke up this morning singing Sympathy for the Devil, for no reason that I can remember (with the words changed to include my name, because I can). Somewhere around the time I was riding a tank and holding a general's rank, I realized that it's probably the only Rolling Stones song that I really like. As I was mentally planning my day and asking who killed the Kennedys, I realized there's another Stone's song that I'm OK with too, and it gave me direction for the day.

I see a beige door, and I want to paint it black.

 

I don't know why I choose stain for this. Really what I want is a nice black enamel. But stain+poly is what I have, so here's the first of 7 or so coats...

 

You can see the coverage isn't very good with one coat. Each coat takes about an hour to dry, which lets me move stuff into my closet while I wait. technically the poly is still drying, but can see light use. It's not supposed to be used for realz until 72 hours after the last coat.

 

And some more black...

 

 

I think I gave up taking pictures after this coat, but I did a few more. I'm sure there's a special spot in hell for girls who don't sand between coats. Dante probably didn't mention it because Beatrice was really into DIY and chilling there or something. At any rate, I didn't bother on this. I did sand it down once before the final coat to help get off some of the drips and weirdness.

 

Since the closets don't match the doors anymore, I decided to give them a coat for good measure too.

 

And here's some pictures of the room before I get the furniture into it.

 

Apparently Pharaoh snuck in and got a claw shedding into the wet poly. I can't get it out, its well covered, and will need to be sanded to be removed. I'm going to pretend it adds character.

Four days to go!

It's been a long few weeks, including several very late nights, but I think I'm on schedule to move back into the bedroom in a few days. The stenciling is finally done!! I also put in the mouldings, which I painted black to match the floor. 

 

 

And now, it's poly-time. This process takes about 8 hours for four coats, and needs to dry for three days afterwards. I'm soooo close to being done.

Stencilin' time

When I started stenciling, I thought it was probably a 2-3 hour job. It turns out I underestimated by a lot. Overall, it took me two days of more than 8 hours each, and another three hours for touchups.

 

 

The try with this stencil, the paint wasn't covering very well using the roller.

 

I decided to use a hand brush to try to fill it in instead, because that puts a little more paint into the stencil.

 

Unfortunately it also caused a lot more bleeding and took a lot longer.

 

The edges aren't as clean as I'd like them to be, so I switched back to rollering. This meant rolling the paint on thinly, waiting for it to dry, then doing it again. This process was incredibly time consuming, each 22 x 22 section took ten to fifteen minutes to complete. There were at least 24 repeats of the stencil, plus edges to fill in, which was why it took so long.

 

The pattern slowly filled over the course of the day, the more that gets on the floor, the better it looks, but I wish I'd made the borders bigger than a foot so I had less to fill in.  

 

 

This stencil is white, instead of the clear one I got for the hallway project. This makes it MUCH harder to match the pattern. I like the patterns that Istencils.com sells better than those at some of the other stencilling sites, but the difficulty in matching the pattern may not be worth it. By the time I finished, I had some large gaps that I had to try to fill in. The room is dark with the ceiling painted, but you can see the big gaps in this picture.