First off, I’d like
to thank those of you who took the little pole at the bottom of the First House Tour Post.
As mentioned, the pole results dictate the room order.
I will begin with the Living Room and Office and make our way to the bathroom- saving the best for last.
Let’s dive right into the Living Room. When we moved into this
Through the dilemma, we prepped for paint anyway. The second trip to the store (the first to purchase new locks)
was to spend about $20 at the dollar store buying gallons of bleach, mops,
buckets, gloves, painters tape, and plastic sheets to get our clean on and prep
for paint. Boy was this place filthy. Thank goodness the previous owner left
behind an equally dirty vacuum so we wouldn't have to use our nice one for that filth.
The first few days of ownership were spent cleaning the mass
amount of spiders with their webs, dust so thick ‘clean me’ wasn’t cutting it,
and bleaching the walls multiple times trying to get rid of smoke residue from
many years of cigarette house abuse. After cleaning the rooms, they were somewhat less of an eye sore.
We didn't bother cleaning up the fruit punch spill since we knew the carpet had to go anyway.
Our method of cleaning: basically wearing gloves, and putting a strong
mix of bleach and hot water into buckets using the mops to clean the walls. It
was quite effective and seemed to cover more surface area than rags. The mop
was also a good choice as there was an extension on our cleaning tool for
shorties like me who have a hard time reaching the top of the wall. Plus at $1
we didn’t care much if the heads broke as they were planned for disposal
anyway.
As I mentioned before, the boyfriend had a hard time not tearing anything
down while I captured some befores. One of the first things he tackled was
taking down the curio cabinet to open the space up even more. He was so quick I
didn’t even have the chance to capture in-progress photos.
I’ll try to explain
while being photo-strapped. I did learn that in order to take something down
(without destroying everything else) is to figure out how the object is
attached. In our case, we started by removing the acrylic glass panels. Next, he detached the inner and outer shelves on each side. Then, we
peeled away the sticky tile- it was super easy since the adhesive was quite
old- with just our hands- well technically I had gloves on as I’m a germ-a-phobe.
This process had us finding some exposed screws.
*The pry bars were my birthday presents and the other tools were already owned.
We then used the
drill to remove all the screws. He did the drilling while I held the unit to
prevent it from falling. The case was being a bit stubborn so we took pry bars
to it gently prying the wood from the paneling. And success:
We kept the
acrylic, which just needs a bit of cleaning, if we ever need it for a future
project. We also donated the side shelves to my pops for shelving in his
kitchen. I believe the rest was garbage or firewood.
We then removed all
light switch covers, disassembled the curtain rods, removed interior door
handles taped and put plastic bags around the exterior door handles and
thermostat. Lastly, we cut the plastic sheets to fit each window and taped them
in place, we also made a make-shift door way into the kitchen.
It was too dark inside to take pictures of bagged and taped windows, but here is what it looked like outside.
We did not cover
the carpet as paint mess was welcome since we knew we would remove the carpet someday. All the trim in the entire house was also removed gently with a pry bar. We opted to paint the whole house at once, except the kitchen so the entire house cleaning and prepping took about a week and a half (nights and weekends). One last tip: it doesn’t hurt to
do a once over just to ensure everything is removed, covered, and generally
prepped for paint.
What about you, what is your paint prep method?
What about you, what is your paint prep method?
P.S. I was not
paid or perked from any of these vendors, we just happily picked up the
supplies necessary for the job.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments make my heart go pitter-patter! Your comment may not appear right away as they are manually accepted.