house project no.1- taking down shelves

When John and I moved into our new place, we made a list of things we’d like to change.  It went from painting the walls to redoing all the floors- we can dream, right?  I ranked them on cost and priority because I’m nerdy like that, and one of the cheapest and most necessary projects was cleaning up the wall above our built-in entertainment unit.  We can’t paint the living room until we take down the shelves and molding, and we can’t unpack our decorative stuff until we have painted walls to hang photos on.  While it’s nice to have a built-in thing to use for our television and tv-related junk, it’s not nice for our TV to sit 6″ off the ground on a homemade platform.  John and I decided right away that we would rip down the shelves, put our TV on top, and build cabinet doors and shelves for our DVD player and such.  For the first phase, all we needed was a little brute strength, E-Z patch and  hard plastic squeegie thing (one more reason I’ll never be a professional handyman- I never know the real name for anything), spray wall texture and patience.  Cheap, right??  

More info from left to right: 1-The unit when we moved in.  The lovely molding is all over the house, so I’ll be really good at patching after this.  2- Right after John and our good buddy Alex ripped the shelves down.  3- a close-up of the worst of the damage- the boards were glued as well as nailed to the wall.  

4- After we did the first round of E-Z Patch.  5- After I spray textured the smooth parts of the wall and painted to see if it looked good enough.  It didn’t.  I just did the (hopefully) last round of patching tonight!  It would have been passable before, but I like to do things right darnit.  6- 3rd times the charm.  The bottom two colors were too dark and way too aqua for our open space.  I ended up asking the nice guy at Sherwin-Williams to match to an archival cardboard box I keep my wedding dress in.  We went with 50% of that- it’s light aqua in the morning, greyish in the afternoon, and something else entirely in the evening.  So far I love it!  John and I can’t paint the living room ourselves so hopefully we can get someone to come out in the next couple weeks to make it all beautiful.

Besides this nearly-done project, we also took similar molding off of the wall of our dining room, painted our bedroom, and painted the second bedroom I’m using as a workroom/guest room (insane robin’s egg blue).  I like staying busy with housey things.  More soon!