Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Ashford's room AKA tiny wallpaper room

Here is Ashford's teeny tiny room right after we moved in and organized.  The room is just 9x11. 
Please allow me a mini pity party as I mourn the room he used to have.
Ok, back to reality.  I hated the tan color on the walls, and of course this was before we refinished the floors. 
The main thing that was wrong in this room, though, was the dreaded wallpaper.  Complete with border.  The seams showed through the paint and just annoyed the hell out of me daily.
You all know I am intimately familiar with removing wallpaper, and there was just no way I was going to paint over this mess again!  We started the horrible task of getting it all off last month. 
We started with a steamer, but I quickly realized I was peeling off the damn popcorn on the ceiling, so we stopped using it.  We are just in NO position to scrape the popcorn right now, so it has to stay.  Unfortunately, we ran into a different problem. 
The original coat of paint was coming off with the wallpaper!  We ended up down to the bare drywall in several spots, the worst one being near the door. 
Seriously, it was so classic that this would happen to us! 
Despite the issue with the paint coming off with the paper, what ended up working best for us was a spray bottle with hot water and fabric softener.  We sprayed the paper, peeled off the top layer, then sprayed the remaining paper backing and scraped that.  It took us all day to get this much done. 
Some of it came off in sheets, but most of it didn't.  I guess that is one advantage to a teeny room, less walls! 
Ashford was still sleeping in here throughout the weeks we were working on this, so you can imagine how fun it was to move everything back and forth every day.  Nothing but the best for my kid.
After all the paper was removed, Shaun spent quality time washing all the walls.  Thankfully, one wash seemed to do the trick.  I came in after that to sand down any remaining adhesive that wouldn't scrape off.  To prepare for the skim coat to cover the bad spots, I used a product designed to stop further peeling on surfaces.
Eh, for a 'high build' primer it was surprisingly thin and unimpressive.  I should've just saved my money and used the Zinsser 1.2.3 instead.  When the spots were all primed, I also went over the old seams.  There was some discoloration, so this helped a lot. 
Next came some lightweight joint compound on all the spots the paint was removed from the drywall.  This took me forever and I had to bust out my drywall pan and knife.  Do you like this anonymous photo of me skimming?  I can't really explain my socks, my pose or this photo.  Let's move on. 
After an entire day of horrifying sanding in which everything in our house somehow got covered in white dust, I was finally able to prime the walls in their entirety!
Oh, it was so wonderful to have normal walls back!  And to have a Coors light!  At this point Ashford was sleeping in our room on a mattress because it just stunk too bad in this room.  So, I took my time and decided to paint the walls their final color later the same day after priming. 
This color is a greige, SW Anew Gray mixed in Behr.  However, it was looking extremely tan going on the walls and I freaked out a little.   Luckily, it ended up like this.
Isn't that crazy?  It doesn't even look like the same color!  Now we just need to find a day to put the painted baseboards in here, and put his room back together permanently with a twin bed instead of a crib.  Ahhhhhh! 
Fun fact:  I was so on point with the skim coat that I spackled all the screw and nail holes that we still wanted to use for the smoke detector, shelves, etc.  Awesome!


  1. LOVE that yellow dresser! The new paint is purty too, congrats on being done with all that wallpaper mayhem.

  2. Good job on tunneling through! Wallpaper is a royal pain. The wall color looks great too. No kidding that is the same color.

  3. Can't wait for the reveal.
    Looks great!
    Whoever invented wallpaper should be shot!!!

    Take lots of reveal pics...soon.


  4. That sucks so much about covering the "wanted" holes. I would try to tell you that it gives you freedom to hang stuff wherever you want but seriously, how many places do you want to hang the smoke alarm?!?? The good news is the room is looking great. I am not a gray person but you picked a great color.

  5. Oh my goodness - why is it that such tiny rooms can still be so much work? The walls look awesome - but I can't get over the difference in the color when it dried. Insanity! I would have freaked out!

  6. You guys did such a great job on getting the popcorn texture down. The previous owners of our old house had sprayed it on the walls and when we tried to remove it we did a horrible job. In the end I just threw up a gallery wall and called it a day. :-)

