Painted walls but still no floor | Spring One Room Challenge | Week Four

Guess what!? We’re finished drywall mudding!!

via GIPHY

I really should say Chris finished drywall mudding because I gave up almost a week ago. With the drywall finished I quickly got the walls primed and painted.

One of the things we’ve learned doing small patches around the house is that we have a very subtle texture on our walls. I’m assuming it’s from the builder, who sprayed the primer and paint. To get our paint to match I used a paint roller for extra rough surfaces to apply the primer. This gives the wall a bit of texture so our new walls don’t look completely flat.

Is this the most professional drywall and paint job ever?

No.

Is it in a closet?

Yes. Moving on.

The next thing we had to tackle was the ceiling. Almost all the ceilings in our house have popcorn ceilings with the exception of the kitchen, the bathrooms and (as it turns out) the inside of Chris’ old closet. We had to decide if we were going to remove the texture and smooth the whole closet ceiling or cover up the smooth sections with popcorn.

While neither of us love the popcorn, and it turns out it’s super easy to remove, it does have it’s advantages – the main one being that it hides not-so-perfect ceilings. So, our choices were actually: add more popcorn and be done the ceiling in 1-2 days or scrape off the popcorn and add an extra week of work making the ceiling perfectly smooth.

Yeah, we popcorn’d the ceiling.

I used Behr texture paint which rolls on a popcorn texture. Applying this stuff was frustrating. First I tried applying it using a “looped roller” (this one) which is apparently “perfect for textured paints”. I hated it. I got more popcorn texture on myself than I did on the ceiling (thank goodness for coveralls!). Then I tried using a regular paint roller, which was not bad, but also not great. After a lot of trial and error (and a lot of popcorn in my hair) my preferred method ended up being to roll a small amount on with a mini foam roller and then dab with the end of a 2.5” paint brush.

You can also find spray cans of the popcorn texture, which we considered instead of the giant 7.5 L (2 gallon) tub, but the Behr stuff was about half the price. We have more than enough left over to use on a couple of other projects we have planned where we will likely do the same thing. 

The roll on stuff isn’t an exact match to what the builder probably sprayed on, but I’m sure once it’s painted you will never even know. I mean, who is looking that closely at the ceilings in our closet?

So, last night things were looking good and I decided to start laying the hardwood floors back down while Chris was out. Surprise honey! We have a floor!

Yeah, not so much.

Everything was going great for about three rows and then I decided to open up the new box we ordered so I could work the new boards in evenly. I open the new box and….it’s the wrong type of flooring! Our floors are something called “lock and fold” which installs very quickly without nails or staples but we were accidentally shipped the staple down version by mistake. Unfortunately the two types have completely different grooves so they don’t fit together at all.

So, I’ve taken my three rows back up again and everything is on hold until our flooring store can get us the correct box from the manufacturer – The store thinks we can get it by early next week (fingers crossed!).

In the meantime I’m going to get started on my bookcase/shoe storage project, where hopefully I will turn this red-ish brown Ikea Billy bookcase into a closet-worthy shoe storage unit!

Thanks so much for visiting! Don’t forget to check out all the other guest participants in the One Room Challenge over on the Calling it Home blog!