Blessed Foundation: Post 3: Master Bedroom

Before we moved in, our master bedroom felt much too old for us. Purple walls and lace curtains weren't going to cut it..

Not to mention stained glass windows. Fortunately, these we're stickers...

...stickers that peeled right off!

Purple was not exactly in our color scheme. The dark walls, beige trim, and dim lighting left the room a little too dark. We needed to brighten things up a bit for our taste -- but this was nothing a little paint couldn't fix!

We got right to work patching holes.

We were going to paint the room beige to lighten it up. Not only were we not sure if one coat of beige would mask the purple paint, we also were worried because the purple was a much shinier paint than what we were using to cover it. (It was more of a semi-gloss and we were using an eggshell.)

We chose to prime the room first with Killz to ensure we wouldn't have to use two coats of our beige paint.

It really went pretty quickly -- I cut in the corners while Alan rolled the walls.

*Sulak Suggestion

Notice we have the windows open now. Killz is extremely potent, so it's important to make sure you have good ventilation. We really should have worn masks too! Everything smelled like Killz for a few hours after painting -- not good!!

The next evening, we retuned to the house to apply the beige coat of paint. We decided our system worked the night before, so I cut in the corners while Alan rolled the walls.

While cutting in the corners, we noticed that the purple paint was peeling away from the walls where the walls met the ceiling.

We were a little concerned about solving the problem quickly before move-in, so we forgot to get good pictures, but you can kind of see it here.

Unfortunately, painting over this didn't make the old paint stick to the walls. When we peeled the old paint off, it not only exposed a crack along the top corner of the room from when the foundation shifted, but it also left a seam several paint coats thick along the top of the wall. Painting over this didn't hide the ridge of paint.

So, maybe paint doesn't solve everything...

We discussed our options and decided we had three:

1. Learn to tape and float drywall and then texture over the corner before repainting

2. Install crown molding to cover the corner completely

3. Leave it as-is and say we wanted to expose the rich history of the house

Okay -- option three was definitely out. That left us with drywalling and crown molding. They both seemed equally difficult for us as rookies, and crown molding seemed to be the option that would most enhance the look of the room, so we decided to go in that direction.

We didn't have a miter saw and didn't want to purchase one just yet, so Alan picked up a miter box from the hardware store.

Without a miter saw, it was going to be much more difficult to cut the corners of the crown molding, so we found some corner pieces to use instead. These were pretty handy! You nail them into the corners of your room (of course, they have to be square corners -- fortunately, that's what we have) and then you can butt the crown molding right up against it without having to cut difficult angles.

Once the corner pieces were all installed, we measured the length of the wall between the two corner pieces and cut the molding to fit.

We recommend using a table or saw horses to do this.
The floor is really hard on your back and on your tarp.

Per my dad's suggestion, before beginning this project, we invested in an air compressor that came with several nail guns to make putting up the molding much easier and faster. Otherwise, we would have had to glue the molding up and use a hammer and nails to keep it up there -- that would have taken ten times as long. Thanks Dad!

We purchased a pancake compressor without wheels, so we wheel it around on a small dolly. It came with two nail guns and a staple gun!

We had to match two pieces of molding together along each wall because the walls were so long. Alan did an awesome job getting the two pieces to sit against the wall and the ceiling at the same angle, and then we caulked between them to hide the seam.

The molding was finished! Alan caulked around everything and sanded it down, and then we painted all of the trim.

If you're interested in more on crown molding, visit our dining room project here!

We had a lot of touch-ups this way, so we decided the next room we painted, we would paint the trim first and then the walls -- we'll see how it goes!

Remember that dim fan?

That had to go. We actually replaced it with a fan from our dining room. We really liked the fan that was in there, but prefer to have a chandelier in the dining room, so this was a perfect steal!

The fan was antique brass, though, and we are changing fixtures and knobs to oil rubbed bronze. Not to worry! We bought a can of oil rubbed bronze spray paint, took the fan apart, taped, sprayed it, and voila! (We also flipped the fan blades to the other side.)