Redecorating!

Ten years to the day after we moved in and painted the front room, we spent the same bank holiday weekend redecorating. Back then, Jeff did not have as many mad drywall skillz as he now does, so the front room was only ever repainted. However, all the other rooms in our house have been re-textured before they were repainted and the front room was looking pretty old and worn. So we decided (and I may have had this idea, but I am disclaiming it, because I cannot possibly have brought all that upon myself out of choice) that we would take the bank holiday weekend to strip the front room, re-texture and re-paint.

Now if you are not familiar with the process of re-texturing let me explain it this way. First you have to empty your room. That means that you fill up every other room in your house with all the crap that was in that one fairly small space to begin with. You massively underestimate how many books you actually own, so you have to take two extra trips to Home Depot to buy extra boxes to put them all in. Then you spend your weekend squeezing your way through the tiny walkways you have left for yourself after all the boxes are stacked in every available floor space.

Having emptied your room and caused massive disruption to every other room in the house, then you get to spend hours and hours masking off all the paintwork and windows and doorways and carpet and ceiling and banisters. Because re-texturing is essentially standing in the middle of the room with a pressurised paint gun and spraying liquid mud all over everything, it is essential that you construct a cave out of plastic sheets in which to do it. Having spent about four hours prepping the room, the actual fun part of spraying is all over in about fifteen minutes. And no matter how carefully you built your plastic sheeted man cave to spray in, there is overspray all over everything anyway. And then you are left with your wreck of a front room, wondering why on earth you thought this was a good idea and how on earth it is ever going to get back to normal!

After three days of intense effort we are approaching the new normal. All toys and books have been banished. I'm a bit gutted about the books, but rejoicing in the fact that I no longer have to look at (and step on) lego construction projects every day. We're not quite finished - we still have art to hang - but I'm loving the pared down look of our new front room!