Step Into My Office

Well, it's actually Scott's office/second guest room, but you get the idea. It's come a long way since it's humble beginnings as the terrifying bat cave that almost kept us from purchasing the house. This wood-laden 9 ft by 8.5 ft room is the smallest bedroom I've ever been in, but over the last couple of months, it has really opened up and become more inviting.

There aren't any really good pictures of the before. The documentation of this dungeon/humidor only truly began when I realized that painting the wood paneling was going to be much trickier than initially anticipated. Here is an example of where I started (Just as a warning, this process has been going on since we moved in, so some of the pictures are better than others. There was a lot of phone photography going on.)

As you can see by the wood paneling on my left, it didn't want to go down without a fight. The primer was oil based to properly cover and adhere to the shiny wood. It worked really well, but was exhausting to apply because it was mostly done with a brush. I didn't use a roller with the primer because my previous oil-based primer shenanigans had resulted in splatter that I didn't want to get on the wood floor. Remember, too, that the top and bottom trim, back of the door, closet, window, and window trim were all the same un-painted wood as the walls. That means that they were also on the list to be primed and painted.

To walk you through the entire process, I figured I'd pick up after all of the priming took place. After two coats of primer, the walls were manageable.

The left only has one coat, the right has two. After I had mostly finished the priming, I took a break on the room.

So for the past 5 months, the room has been left looking like this.

Until now.

I ended up using a light color because going too dark would really make the room feel cave-like. I picked a light gray/blue and grabbed a gallon from Home Depot (after appropriate sampling, of course. It's the middle one on the right hand side of the picture below).

Unfortunately, before I could even open my paint, a lot needed to happen to prep the walls. Most of that prep was spackling, and most of that spackling involved tiny holes. Once the primer had been applied, the walls certainly looked better, it's true, but this

actually looked pretty ratty because of these

I just took my time (3 hours, to be exact) and applied my spackle to all of the holes I could see. I had to step around the room and look at the walls from different angles because of the divots in the panels, but it was worth it. Painting the wood without doing this would have left it looking like someone just slapped a lot layers of paint on particle board and that was not the look I was going for.

When I was finally able to grab a brush and open my gallon of paint, I started at the bottom trim and worked my way up. I had to make sure to work the paint into each of the slats because the roller wouldn't be able to reach in the routered sections.

One issue that I had was that the paint went on practically white, so seeing where I had and hadn't already painted was a bit tricky. Thankfully, it dried a little darker and I could go back later and touch up. This was all made that much more perilous by the fact that we couldn't move all of the furniture out of the room, so we were working around this.

Once all the walls had been edged (the trim has been completely painted since I primed the walls), I was then able to come back with a roller and roll the color onto the flatter portions of the paneling. It was so satisfying, but my wrist was pretty sore from brushing all day so I had Scott finish it when he got home. It was nice because he is tall and able to use the roller without a stool.

We let the first coat dry and came back with a second after seeing some spots that we had initially missed. After the second coat dried, we moved everything back in.

It's difficult to describe how much better the rooms feels to someone who wasn't able to bask in it's horriblness before, but let me tell you, it's pretty awesome in there now.

So much less embarrassing for people to see (except for maybe that Ikea couch)! The room just feels like it's really a part of the house now, unlike before when we tried to keep the door shut as much as possible. There is still one issue that lurks in there that we won't be tackling for a while, though.

Yeah, that's three different types of ceiling finish. There is a different type in each part of the house, but only Scott's office has two inch peaks hanging from above. Why? We don't know. We haven't met one person who has ever seen anything like it before. We have tried wetting it down and scraping it, but it didn't do a lot of good. I ended up going at it with a hammer and chisel and made a bit of a dent a couple of months ago, but it's a very messy process and I haven't tried again since.

We aren't sure if we are going to try to sand it down, recover it, pull the whole thing out and replace it, or just keep chiseling yet, but I'm sure when we do, you guys will get the whole story!

What do you think of the office now? Do you have any room changes that took forever but made a huge difference? Hopefully this will make you feel more comfortable about painting paneling you might encounter in the future!

Tide is High

You know what I'm getting at...

It's a nice tropical song to match the amazing weather we've been having here lately! Which is great, because work on Scott's Office is still going on. In fact, this week I felt like adding a little art to the space.

I had wanted to do a layered paper artwork for a while, but finally found some inspiration in a color scheme I found on Pinterest. I grabbed one piece of scrapbook paper in each of the colors I liked and grabbed a piece of foam board. in all (aside from the frame, this entire project costs less than $10 to do).

I ended up with 8 different pieces of paper/colors. I decided to make a wave pattern that would allow them to all overlap. I used my 2 inch hole punch flipped upside down to make the cuts.

Just line up the top of the paper about to the diameter mark and cut a hole. The pattern should start like this.

Continue this till you reach the other side. I did it on all of my pieces of paper, making sure to try to not line up each wave so that there was some random overlap. I didn't really care that mine weren't level across the paper, but you can always draw a level line and then line your hole punch up with that.

Once they were all cut, they looked like this. I lined them up so that they were stacked with each one being lower just to make sure that they looked correct.

Then I trimmed each piece of paper to make it shorter. You don't have to measure this part until you are cutting the wave that is in the front. I just kind of cut each piece of paper in half.

After lining them back up, I took some tape and taped them together to hold them in place. This can also be accomplished with glue, just don't use too much because you don't want the paper to pucker.

I made some lines to cut the whole thing down a little bit because I was trying to even out the sides. This was done by leveling the sides with the top-most wave and them drawing them parallel. Then I trimmed them with a straight edge and x-acto knife.

Once it had been trimmed, I made a 90 degree cut along the bottom to square it off a bit. Once again, I didn't measure  the height of the piece to each wave because I wanted this to look slightly hand made, but you can if that's the look you are going for. Once it was all trimmed, I flipped it back over.

I then centered it on the piece of foam board that I had already cut to fit into a frame I had laying around (Michael's has BOGO sales on their nicer poster frames all the time. The other frame I had gotten as part of the deal is holding an awesome Fifth Element poster from Etsy).

After popping it back in the frame, I hung it up in the office.

It's super simple and adds a nice happy touch of color to the room. The space is small, so this fits really well. Now if only the space was a little nicer looking. Notice the primed-but-not-painted corners of the wall.

At least we are still looking much better than we started! There aren't any good "before" pictures of it (and it's terrifyingness), but imagine a 8.5 ft by 9 ft room completely made out of wood, rim and all.

Don't even get us started on that ceiling! The ceiling might not be something we can work on at the moment, but the walls are.Yeah, don't worry, that's the next thing we're tackling as part of Scott's Office Week! Happy April everyone!

On Permanent File

So this week has been designated Scott's Office Week. It's going to be all about the projects that we are doing in there to get ready for Saturday when someone will be using it as a second guest room. I started out by rectifying a wrong (looking) piece of furniture that has been sitting around for a while. Our file cabinet came from a garage sale for $5 when Scott moved into his first apartment, so it's been around for a couple of years. Since then, it hadn't been touched.

We like having it in there because it acts as both storage and as a side table for our small couch/guest bed. It's a really small space, so there aren't a lot of options.

I dragged it out to the garage and took a scrapper to it's many flaws.

I then roughed it up with just a regular sanding block so the paint would stick better. This also included removing the handles by prying them out of the holes in the aluminum.

My tools of choice

Primer

Done with the drawers open so I could get all sides. If you really cared, you could tape it off for crisper lines, but I didn't mind because I knew that the drawers would be close 90% of the time.

I threw some of the gray that I used from the coffee table on the handles in one coat.

Then started in with the fire engine red. Two coats in all.

I put some poly on it to protect it and then placed it back inside next to the couch (after letting it dry, of course).

I liked it, but I felt like it needed something. I ended up getting some of the cork self adhesive shelf liner you can buy anywhere.

Flipping it over, and marking it after measuring the top of the cabinet.

Then it just cuts with scissors.

After lining it up, I slowly pulled off the paper backing as I went and applied it to the top of the cabinet.

I actually coated the cork in poly, too, just to help keep it together since cork isn't known as a strong material. After letting it dry, we placed it back in the office.

The cork ads a nice texture to the room. I really like the fact that you can set anything down on it and it won't scratch. The best thing is that after it wears down or starts to look ratty, I can always just peel it off and replace it. It's a much cooler way for us to store our files, now!