Friday we spent a good four hours in Lowe's getting supplies, stopped at the Benjamin Moore store for paints, and dropped our arsenal at the store, where we discovered that the carpeting was glued with a very thick layer of nasty glue to the concrete beneath it. This was particularly bad news, since my plan was to simply remove the carpet and have lovely industrial cement flooring. Stripping the glue would be disastrous, and would certainly involve getting very, very high off noxious chemical strippers (wouldn't THAT be a good band name? Noxious Chemical Strippers!), so I had to come up with a Plan B for the floors. I am not a big fan of Plan B.
Saturday morning bright-and-early, Mama and I loaded up the truck and went down to the store to get started. Sadly, I didn't manage to get a true 'Before' picture, but you can get an idea of what the space looked like from this shot:
See that magenta-fuchsia wall? That was less than awesome to cover, but Killz is magical stuff so it only took two coats to COMPLETELY cover it up. The 'bricks' at the back are wallpaper. We feared that we would have to strip it, and mom discovered that the previous tenants had used an extra adhesive to make the stuff REALLY stick to the walls. The good news is, that made it stick so well that we could paint right over it!
The previous baseboards tore off big chunks of the wall, so we had to putty over them.
But we did it! Rome was not built in a day, but we did manage to finish all the priming in just one day, no small thanks to help from my family and pseudo-family: Mama, Lexi, Travis, Will, and Louis.
It looks so much better already! Its amazing what a little primer can do.
ReplyDelete