ORC: The Big Boy Room - Getting Started {Week 3}

Welcome back! So in my Before post, I mentioned we had fixed a few of the annoying parts about this room. This was all PIY (pay it yourself) because we discussed and quickly decided to hire some contractors to come in for 4 days and deal with all the issues in ALL the rooms on the second floor as this could have easily taken us noobs months of weekends to complete ourselves.  And while updating molding and/or hanging doors might not sound that difficult, with a deadline like ours, we were not willing to cut our teeth on this. Sometimes it just pays to pay someone else. To recap the fixable issues in this room:

1. Those radiators have about 10 layers of paint on them, and are constantly falling away from the wall. Hours of fun for a curious toddler.
2. There are about 3 different types of molding in this room entire house. Some clamshell, some colonial, some walls have shoe molding, some don't. This inconsistency is quite consistent throughout our house, by the way. Drives. Me. Insane.
3. And that doorway is in the left corner of the room (basically where the photo is taken from), however, the door opens TO THE RIGHT. Whyyyyyyyy.
4. The ceiling boob light is about 11 inches to the right of the center of the ceiling. I repeat. Whyyyyyyyyy.

Prime example of the inconsistency in molding hanging out in the middle of our hallway.  Some shoe, some not, some non-molding patchwork, as you do apparently.

The contractors removed all the molding around the floor, windows and doors and installed simple colonial with shoe molding.  We have consistency! (PS we had already done this in most rooms on the first floor with initial construction when we bought the house).  They also added new pre-hung doors so all of our doors actually shut now (great for guests that don't appreciate when our fat tabby cat pushes into their room to join them on the bed at night).  They hung 11 doors and two sets of accordion closet doors (major upgrade to reaching into the closets over the old sliding doors). We decided against rehanging closet doors in this room, and you'll see why soon enough. They switched the swing of the doors on a few rooms and closets as well - so things are feeling much more feng shui. 

We also had an electrician come in and center the boob light on the ceiling of this room, as well as move the light switch farther down the wall of the closet because the door to this room swings to the left now, and the old switch is behind the door.  This ended up being a step we really didn't need to take and pay for, and I'll explain why in a future post (cliffhanger!).  

Last but not least - we have new radiator covers throughout the house!  I feel much better about the lack of probable lead paint that was chipping off every time a section fell off the wall when William decided to touch it. 

We did not pay the contractors to do any touchups - so we have a LOT of caulking and painting to do. We even have to touch up the walls with spackle and whatever color paint was in the room around all of the radiators because the old ones were absurdly high and now crappy sheetrock is exposed. But the focus has been to get through all of those tasks in the Big Boy Room before we move onto the other rooms.  Breathe, Kayla, breathe.  At least the construction aspect was done in 4 days by someone else. #worthit

So first things first - we caulked and painted the molding. We are pretty brand loyal to Behr paint products due to the fact that we haven't had any issues, usually can find a color we like made by them, and sheer convenience (Home Depot is about 8 minutes away).  I actually don't get crazy with all the different 'whites' out there, and we used their off-the-shelf Ultra Pure White semi gloss for all the molding and doors.  Next, we painted three of the walls and the ceiling with their off-the-shelf Ultra Pure White flat interior paint.  Easy peasy.  What is nice is that these products are all low odor and no VOC so this preggo can do the most of the painting (I find painting seriously relaxing, even if it takes me double the time to do it than it would take Tom. Anyone else hog all the painting for themselves?).  I kinda insisted on being the lead painter while Tom (and his father) continued with caulking in other rooms.  Even though completely this room is the priority, it all has to get done eventually, right?

I suck at white balance. 

The men did prep the statement wall with wallpaper primer as suggested by the wallpapering instructions. I wrongfully assumed the primer would actually be white, so I'm glad I did at least a little cutting in with the regular white paint before this went up. The primer is actually a milky color in the can (and stinky, so I took this opportunity to put my feet up downstairs on the couch) and dried fairly clear.  Though fully dried after 1 hour, its stays slightly tacky, and is allegedly going to help with adhering the wallpaper, as well as making this wallpaper easier to remove down the line (only time will tell on that part). Maybe an unnecessary extra step, but given this is our first attempt at wallpapering, we wanted to go by the book for the most part.

Fun fact - see that small section unpainted on the ceiling? WE RAN OUT OF PAINT with only a  small section left. So annoying.

The last bit o' painting that had to occur is inside the closet.  We received some hand-me-down dressers from my parents, and the shorter one fits well in here, so after removing the wooden dowel that was used to hang clothes from (you know so William can't swing from it) we are going to attach a changing pad to that dresser and change William in this nook until he is out of diapers.  Since there is a lot of white and black going on in the rest of the room, we decided to do something a little more bright in here, that would also hopefully tie in the other colors in the room to make it all look more purposeful.  You can also see in this shot that the door now swings TO THE LEFT! The door is going to get some semi-gloss white but I think I'm going to wait to do all the doors & closets (13!) at once after this baby comes.

Next week: WALLPAPER & CLOSET!!!  Teaser because this molding before and after  is just too good not to show:

Don't forget to check out the other guest participants on ORC Week 3! And just for fun try and find my link (did I get up early enough to break the top 100 in the linky party? No, no I didn't.).

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