{ 500,000 Projects, None Completed }

I am ready to paint.

 I've been ready to paint for a while now. 

The dry wall is not quite ready yet though. 

In good news it is DEFINITELY looking like things will be moving along quicker now that the drywall is almost done. I feel like I've been saying that statement for awhile now, and I have, but since we cant quit our jobs or quit being parents and work full time on this house everything will always take a long time to reach completion. Nothing is actually completed yet in this house. 

We have about 500,000 projects going all at once. Thats how we roll. Currently we are working on the living room. We didn't have to replace any plaster/drywall in this room but we did have a lot of fixing to do on the plaster. A lot of spots were cracking and bubbling up so we knew if we just painted over it that eventually those spots would chip off so we wanted to take care of the issue now instead of leaving an issue for later. 

Remember the living room?

That was the cleanest it has been and that lasted about 5 minutes. Here's how it's looking now. Sorry about the blurry photos but it's hard to get a great shot with dust in the air.

We scraped along the surface at all the bubbling/cracking spots and slowly chipped away so that each spot could be patched. The photo above shows a whole section that has been chipped, sanded, and patched. The next step is to skim coat the whole thing with drywall mud and then sand it smooth. 

Heres a close-up of the chipping method we used. 

You can see that the wall has a texture to it. We aren't huge fans of the texture so by sanding and skim coating the surface it should remove most of that texture and appear much smoother.

Did you see that I didn't get the trim in this room primed yet? I really was hoping to get that done but drywall dust and wet primer don't play well together so I will have to wait until the drywall is completely done to start back up on the trim. 

I've made a decision on what I want to do with that empty spot above the fireplace. At first we were going to just try to fill it in with drywall. But then I saw this website and we really liked what they did so we are going to do something similar. They have an awesome tutorial on how they did it too so I am really excited to see this happen in my house. I still really want to white wash the brick at some point like I referenced here, but I will probably wait to see what it looks like with the trim work done first because if I really like it then maybe it will stay...we shall see. 

Our goal is to have ALL the drywall finished by the end of next week. Ok, maybe thats just my goal but hopefully Mark will agree. My plan is to prime and paint the walls upstairs this week. That drywall is about a day away from finally reaching completion so this plan should be reality. After that I am going to bring the kids beds up there that I bought off craigslist and paint those. I'll be sharing all those projects as they happen. 

I'm off to the paint store today to pick out colors for a couple rooms. Anybody have any great paint colors they want to recommend?