This old home: bedroom facelift before and after
When you celebrate your 95th anniversary, you don’t need a birthday party. You need a facelift! As my house enters 95 years on (its little space on) Earth, I try my hand at a few minor cosmetic projects to honor the history of the house I call home.
My most recent project was a guest bedroom. This is what the room looked like when I moved in. Prior to me moving in, I think it had been mostly used as a storage room.
Ever get something in your head that you can’t get out? And even if you haven’t thought it through, you dive in face first? That was me when I ripped out the carpeting one day. There was beautiful hard wood flooring under there. Somewhere way under there.
The carpet had been glued to the floor for the last (who knows how many) decades. No stopping me now!
Step three, enter my father. He used a chemical solution to loosen the leftover foam and glue, and a wood floor was exposed. Thank you, dad;)
Backing up a bit, the days before I pulled out the carpet, I’d ripped down the wallpaper and painted it a sunny color. This bright sun-room was filled the with my great aunt’s 1940s bedroom furniture. While the room looked fine, it certainly didn’t look dam# fine! Nor did it honor the vintage beauty of an early 1920s American home.
Determined I could sand the floor myself, I asked a local business to rent their sander. He pointed me to a pro, warning me that everyone that rents a sander brings it back and tells him “never again!” Point taken.
Once I peaked in and saw the finished result, I realized the difference between doing a job and doing a good job. A dam# fine job;) Exactly what I was looking for. The natural wood had a lot more yellow in it than I expected, so my husband and I shopped for a new paint color.
A Sherwin-Williams Harmony ad randomly appeared in a magazine I was breezing through, and then it again surfaced in an online article my husband read about non VOC paints. The magazine ad primed me (no painting pun intended) to be thinking about Sherwin-Williams when we read the article about the top five toxic-free paint brands, and we were sold on the variety of colors we could choose from.
My husband and I taped and laid down old bedsheets before painting, primarily because I can get messy. Growing up painting out-buildings with my sister and dad, he always said she was a good painter, whereas him and I were “outdoor painters”. Mid-paint, the hubby and I decided we needed an Accu-Brush for our next paint job instead of taping. Since we have an entire year to celebrate our ‘ol girls’ 95th, the edging paint roller would save a lot of time on our upcoming projects.
On to the next room!
*See my follow-up post on our next project, the adjoining guest bedroom makeover.
The chalkboard wall quickly became a home for new year’s resolutions. See the wall, and read “Seven tips to make your new year’s resolution a reality“.
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