Time for Living Room Spackle

I am finally ready to start working on the living room in this dump. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working hard on the garage when I haven’t been running kids here and there, cooking, cleaning or writing my novel. Let’s also not forget to add sleep into the equation as well as planning a birthday party for my little soon-to-be seven year old princess.

So I got the garage walls primed (with the help of my two older kids) and painted, and then my hubby helped me prime the ceiling and I painted it with ceiling white. While my hubby and I were putting the primer on the ceiling, my little princess came out there and said, “Wow, Mama, I didn’t know they had yellow ceilings!” I had to laugh because the difference between the yellowed ceilings from a room that had been smoked in and the bluish-gray tint of the primer was quite drastic. I was amazed at how white the ceiling turned out when I finally finished painting it.

So at some point in there, it was time to prime the baseboards and the crown moulding. I filled my paint cup and started to put primer on the baseboards in the corner. I stopped suddenly when, oh crap, I realized that I had forgotten a very important step. I needed to vacuum the floor under the baseboards so I wouldn’t get foreign paint chips, lint, dust, etc. in the primer on the baseboards. I went and got the shop-vac and set to work. Not long into the process, I realized that the vacuum could only suction so much from under the baseboards, so I pulled out my handy-dandy little hand broom and started to brush with enough force to inflict injury while holding the end of the shop-vac tube next to the broom to suction up anything that came out. That worked for the first half of the room where there was mostly paint chips and dust, but when I got to the back of the room where the people before us had their furniture, I had to brush and then suction back and forth because there was so much stuff under the baseboards.

Now I would like to add a disclaimer here: if you have a weak stomach, I suggest you skip this paragraph because the stuff I brushed out from under those baseboards was disgusting. I found cigarette butts; two dimes; old, rusty nails; dead bugs; live bugs; a shriveled up worm coated in some sticky, tarry substance that looked and smelled like old feces; tons of carpet fibers and lint also covered in that nasty substance; glass shards of all shapes, sizes and colors; splinter of wood; and a paperclip. Most of the items had at least some of that sticky, tarry substance on them. And yes, for precautionary purposes, I was wearing a pair of nitrile gloves.

So an hour and a half later, I finally finished this brushing and vacuuming process, and it was time to prime the trim. The only problem was I felt like I needed a shower so I could actually put the primer on. I do not have a weak stomach, but that almost did me in. So I took a shower and finished putting the primer on. By the time I finished priming and painting the entire room, I felt so accomplished that I wanted to celebrate. But that feeling of accomplishment waned when I realized that I had forgotten to finish painting the door! The original paint on it was really bad not to mention the cigarette smell so I had already primed it. I finally finished painting it Saturday morning.

And now it’s time to start to spackle the living room. This ought to be fun!

Happy Home Improvement!