Seeing Red

Eight and a half years after we started redoing the room which would become our bedroom, I finally started painting this week.

When we first moved into this house in 1998, this room was used as the guest/junk room. It was pepto-bismol pink and it smelled funny, especially in the closet. There was one large triple window, but it was in really bad condition. Only one of the three sections could be opened. On two of the three sections, one layer of glass was broken, so they were single pane. We tried storing cardboard boxes in the closet, but after just a couple of weeks, they got mildewy. After that, it was just wasted space.

When we started redoing the room, one of the first things we did was rip up the floor. There we discovered the source of odor: the sewage pipe from the bathroom went under the closet, and it was missing a piece. The horizontal pipe emptied directly into the vertical pipe--instead of a bend piece, it was open. Eeeew! Once that was fixed, the room smelled a bit better, but it was still a little funky. The floor also hid places where the subfloor wasn't poured all the way out to the rock foundation. Here it was just dirt. Filling these holes solved the mildew problems in those corners. In the meanwhile, we had just the cement sub-floor for a year or so.

We also ripped down the ceiling/attic floor and redid it so that we could store things in the attic and not risk stepping through the rotted boards (15 inch wide oak, but so rotted we could break them by hand). We replaced the 1950's vintage triple window with a smaller but more age appropriate double window. That in itself would have made the room darker, which we'd never do, so we also reinstalled two windows in the gavel end of the house. From the outside, we could see where these windows had been bricked up. The view out these windows is probably the best in the house, and we often see wildlife in that direction. When we put in these windows, we pulled down the drywall that had lined that wall. Behind the drywall was fiberglass insulation, but it looked more like a giant ant farm for mice. Once that was gone, the smell disappeared.

We did all this from sub-floor to ceiling ourselves. We did have an electrician do some work and inspect what we'd done, and we had someone else coat the brick and adobe walls with cement. Then we installed in-floor heating and click together wood-laminate flooring. This knotty pine flooring looks okay and age appropriate, but it turned out to be a bit soft and has scratched easily. Shortly before our daughter was born, we moved our bedroom into this room.

After that, remodeling was no longer a priority. We decided the cement walls were too rough, so we spackled all but the chimney. We also installed a wood burning stove. Before we could paint, I wanted to fix all the cracks and scratches in the spackle. Unfortunately I'm far too much of a perfectionist for this job, and I would work for hours on just a couple of square feet. By this fall, I'd finally managed to spackle over 3/4 of the room, but the remaining walls came into room (around the pantry) and were especially exposed. I just couldn't get them right. We brought in the pros, and these two guys did the job in about half an hour. Spackle complete, we now had no excuses not to paint. I no longer liked the original blue color scheme we had selected for the room 7 years ago, so we started over with a mountain of brochures and paint chips. Having worked at a paint factory, I was inspired to challenge my inclination to paint everything a variation on white, so we chose deep red for the interior walls. I wanted tan for the exterior walls, but my husband feared it would look like we tried and failed to match the light yellow of the kitchen, so we chose a warm white.

We started with the chimney, which really couldn't be anything other than white. Really, there was no reason we couldn't have done this years ago. It certainly would have made sense to paint it before installing the fireplace. This was phase one, and I did the first coat on Wednesday (a holiday because of the 13th day of Christmas). The paint really got sucked into the cement, so there wasn't enough for two coats. We apparently bought the last one liter can of this stuff in Skåne, but we did manage to find more paint (a larger can and a different brand) so I could do the second coat on Saturday. I also did the prep work for the red walls and brush painted the edges and corners on Saturday then continued on Sunday. When I first opened the can, I was shocked--it was bright red and a little pinkish. As I painted, I was reminded of all the things that were this color: lipstick, firetrucks, etc. The second coat looked more like our old Volvo 740. Miraculously, the third coat dried darker and pretty much how we expected. The white chimney is pretty contrasty, so I think I'll get my way with the darker exterior walls, but that will have to wait a few weeks.

The biggest question remains: Why didn't we do this years ago?