Blog Every Day in July: Day 2, Home Improvement

I've been watching a lot of HGTV lately, and it looks like home improvement is the theme for this summer.  My sister recently bought a house, so she and her husband have been focusing on giving their new home some personality and making it as inviting as they can on a budget.  They are also working with my dad to remodel their laundry room into a space that doesn't look like it might have it's own miniature ecosystem.  Meanwhile, my parents are remodeling their master bathroom (and when I say my parents, I mean my dad...)--which crosses off another item on my mom's "wish list" (other rooms that have been crossed off: the kitchen, my bathroom).  So I decided to hop on the bandwagon and start my own project for the summer.

BEHOLD:

I think the star of this photo is my sister's 2002 haircut.

When I was ten years old, my sister and I decided that we wanted to design our own bedrooms.  So I opted for deep purple walls and some paisley sheets, which went really well with my ikea furniture, my beaded curtains, and my giant Tuck Everlasting movie poster (????????).  This just confirms the fact that I was a hot mess as a kid.  Honestly.

Anyways, my sister opted to go for a more cohesive theme (PFFT).  The picture above is a pretty accurate representation of the concept.  She decided to design the room around Van Gogh's "Starry Night".  The framed work in the photo above is a tissue-paper project that someone made for an art class, and Melissa bought it for thirty dollars.  You can kind of see in the picture that the wall is a pretty dark blue, and that my sister was REALLY EXCITED ABOUT STARRY NIGHT.  What you can't see is...the rest of the room.

The room was full of star and moon themed trinkets, and her bedspread had illustrations that look like they came out of a deck of tarot cards.  And it had all of this built in furniture that my dad made himself, which was really cool of him to do and we got like eleven years of use out of it--but it took up a ton of space.  Very appropriate for fifteen-year-old Melissa.  Not very appropriate for twenty-one-year-old Melanie.

FINISHED PRODUCT.
Just kidding.

This is what the room looks like right now.  One of the item's on my mom's wishlist is to turn my room into a guest room, and to turn Melissa's room into my room (seeing as she no longer needs it, on account of she now owns an entire house).  It's obviously a work-in-progress...but things are moving along a lot faster than I thought they would.

The first thing we desperately needed to do was repaint.  The dark blue fit well with the Starry Night theme, but it doesn't really fit in with....any other theme.  So easy fix, right?

NOPE. 

The previous owner of our house decided that it would be a great idea to cover the entire house head-to-toe with wallpaper.  Except, SURPRISE, removing wallpaper is hard...so when it came time to sell the house, they opted to paint over the wallpaper instead of removing it.

In case you were wondering, painted wallpaper is harder to remove than unpainted wallpaper.

Here you can see each step of removing the wallpaper.  You can see a little bit of the dark blue on the top right.  After we peeled off the paint and the top layer of the wallpaper, there was still all this leftover adhesive to remove (which you can kind of see to the right of the ladder, underneath the blue).  In order to remove that, you have to soften it up and carefully scrape it off of the drywall gently, making sure you don't scrape up the drywall (spoiler: I scraped up the drywall).

"BUT WAIT MELANIE...AREN'T WALLS USUALLY WHITE???".  Uhhh yeah.  Ideally, you would prime your drywall with some white primer before sticking on some wallpaper, or so I hear.  I guess the old owner of this house was left out in the dark on that one.  WHICH IS WHY IT TOOK US TWO DAYS TO REMOVE ALL OF THE WALLPAPER.

So after we painstakingly scraped off all of the wallpaper and adhesive, all we had to do was sand, spackle, and prime the wall, and then we'd be paint ready!

That's about as far as we've gotten.

Stay tuned for a post about furniture shopping, some decor inspirations, and the bound-to-be-drama-filled painting experience.