Week 7 - The Dining Room, or Why I Love to Spackle!

Michele's challenge this week should have been an easy one for us... because our dining room is pretty bare. Just a table, chairs, my Great-Grandmother's china cabinet, and a couple of 5 gallon buckets of wheat berries. EXCEPT that I decided that THIS was the week we were going to repaint the wall in the dining room.
We've lived in this house a little over 11 years. When we moved in, the house was covered in an assortment of tacky, 1970's wallpaper, paneling, and mirrors. About ten years ago I decided to tear the wallpaper off of the wall in the dining room and paint it a lovely historic color I found at Lowe's. The problem was, we never got all of the wallpaper backing paper off of the wall, and with a 100+ year old house, other things always came first. I never got the paint. Plus there was that little thing called home education thrown in there-LOL!

So this week, I offered the girls money if they would take the rest of the paper off for me when they were done with their schoolwork. Arlene did most of the work, so she will get most of the money. Taking the paper down isn't difficult, just time consuming. Spray it with Windex, then scrape it off (using the extra Pampered Chef pan scraper) once the glue releases. Under the paper is textured plaster - that is where the tricky part comes in. You have to scrape a little bit at a time and work around the lumps in the plaster.

This morning, after we finished the scraping, I spackled the holes in the wall, and the larger cracks. Joint compound, a.k.a. spackle is fun stuff. It takes time to learn to use it, but when you do, it's hard to stop yourself. So while it was out, I also fixed the two messed up places in the stairway, and filled in holes in the wall in the upstairs bathroom. Just like love covers over a multitude of sins, spackle covers over a multitude of old house imperfections. We have a quart-sized tub, our house has a lot of walls that need a lot of love!

Then we went to Lowe's to get the paint. Easy, because I already knew what I wanted. After a couple more errands, we headed home and began to tape off the ceiling and side walls. I would like to paint the other walls above the chair rail, but I think those can wait until this summer when we can open the windows for some fresh air.

After cutting in the corners, I showed the girls how to use the roller. Then I went to work on the tricky painting. Those pipes for the radiators, and the corner behind the pipes took a while. We were almost done when Kurt came downstairs. There are a few places where thin spots showed after the paint dried, so we're going to add a second coat - hopefully tomorrow afternoon. Then we'll still have a couple things to finish up the dining room.

While up on the ladder, I noticed how filthy the ceiling fan is. That will need to get washed soon. I also still need to sort out the bottom of the china cabinet. Those are fairly simple things, so hopefully they'll get finished soon, and we can move on to next week's challenge - the living room. I could just skip next week since 75% of what is in the living room is Kurt's... but I suppose I should help him sort through it.

In case you love our new color and want to look for it yourself, I'm including the paint number. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a quality organization. I love how they've worked with Valspar to re-create historically accurate colors. The color Filoli Garden Pool, 5003-10C, is from a house in Woodside, California, circa 1917. Since our house was built in 1910, it might not have been an available color when our house was built, but it definitely could have been used during the first repainting. Several places in our house have 7 or more coats of paint, so I'm guessing it was repainted every 10-15 years. Please excuse the blue painter's tape, newspaper, and drop cloth in the picture. They'll come out after the second coat.

Come back next week and find out if Kurt cleaned up the living room, if I cleaned the ceiling fan in the dining room, and if the clock gets re-hung after the second coat of paint!

Have a wonderful week!