Jude's room

Most of the house is still very much a work in progress, but there is one space that we have completely finished. That space is bedroom #1, the room that will eventually be just Jude's. For now, it is shared by Jude and Ivy.

This is Jude's room the day we closed on the house. It took a few days just to clear it all out.

Once the room was cleared out, we could see what we were dealing with. Significant water damage on one corner of the room due to a leaky air conditioning unit, a broken ceiling fan, a lot of cracked plaster, bad wiring, ceiling tiles, and a chipped painted floor.

In progress. We saved as much plaster as we could, repairing the cracks and evening out the surface, and then painting with Killz primer before the wall color (regular paint won't adhere to this unfinished type of plaster without some serious priming). We removed the water damaged plaster and replaced it with drywall. That tiled ceiling came out, too, and was replaced with a drywall ceiling. 

Mark replaced all the electric lines in the house, and when he finished out this room he put in a nice new ceiling fan and some USB outlets near the bed. Every outlet in the house is a safety outlet.

Walls almost finished here, but you can see a little bit of wallpaper still stuck at the top

New ceiling fan and new ceiling in progress. Ceiling fan got very dusty.

I was worried about possible lead paint on the floors but I tested them and nothing came up. I experimented with a few paint removers and it seemed that there were actually only a couple of layers of paint on the floor, and they came up pretty easily with paint remover and a scraper. I finished with a brush and some laquer thinner to get it out of the grooves. The floor underneath is wide-plank heart pine. I probably spent over a week on my hands and knees scraping the paint off this floor. Around the same time, I was looking at a high-end flooring catalog and found "reclaimed look" flooring that looked exactly like my work in progress. It was made to look just like heart pine with bits of gray and blue paint. It was gorgeous, so I decided to leave the imperfections and seal it up with polyeurethane for floors. I absolutely adore the floors in this room now, tiny bits of paint and all.

I was so excited to take a picture of this finished room I forgot to reattach the top on the last piece of baseboard! The color is Lunar Surface by Behr.

Here is the room now that Jude has moved in. 

Looking back toward the door and closet.