Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Living room wallpaper

I've been working on the living room for the past few days. Here is the last picture I posted of the living room back in june.



Just after this I had done a lot of work on the room but was then diverted off to other things so I left the room unfinished. There were at least 3 layers of wallpaper on the walls and multiple coats of paint between at least 2 layers.

The original plan was to remove all the wallpaper and paint the walls. This proved a lot more difficult than we had originally thought.

The ideal solution wold have been to buy some awesome Bradbury & Bradbury wallpaper and hang that over the old wallpaper, but because I'm not made of money that wasn't an option.

The solution I found was paintable wallpaper. The plus is that it's cheap, we got it on clearance for $10 a roll. The minus is that you have to do twice the work, first wallpaper, then paint.

I had gotten as far a wallpapering about 70% of the room before I had to move on to other things  a few months back. Since we spend most of our time in this room I decided it was time to finish it.

First I patched up a few areas of the plaster that needed it.



Then I rolled on a coat of wallpaper primer.



And then I installed the wallpaper.




Once the wallpaper was dry I was able to paint. First I painted all the trim, then rolled on the paint, then cut in. That took longer than I had anticipated because the trim paint took a lot longer to dry than I thought. I think it's because it's semi-gloss. I'm used to satin, which drys fairly fast.

Once it was all dry I moved our furniture in.







I have not done anything above the picture rail yet, there is wallpaper up there that needs to come down then I'll paint it a very light tan, almost white.