Paint Ready by Picardy Project

walls, ceilings

Paint Ready

By Picardy Project on Dec 19, 2011

This weekend we got the front room paint ready, yay!!! In order to get all the way there we had to do lots of little things that neither of us were really particularly excited for.

First off? Finishing the texture! We only had 2 more ceiling bays to get to and Chris hopped up on the ladder and got it finished off

While he was working on that I walked around the entire room and scrapped it. When applying the texture some areas are a bit higher and there are sometimes little accidental clumps of joint compound, so I went around and knocked everything down that was too high

The next morning we knocked down the texture in the new areas that Chris had applied texture to, and then we were finally done with texture, woo-hoo!

But the fun certainly wasn't stopping there.

Next it was time to "clean" all the floors. We didn't spit shine them or anything, but joint compound had fallen on clumps on the floor here and there and all the dust from knocking down the texture was making us track little joint compound footprints throughout the house, so it was necessary to do at least minimal cleaning.

First up was cleaning the baseboards so we got a nice clean cut in line

Then it was time to sponge the floor (and this is after a round of sweeping)

We fiddled around on other house tasks while we waited for the floor to dry, and then it was time to clean the walls, bleh

Cleaning the walls is not fun, but absolutely necessary after joint compound. When you sand or scrape there is dust left on the walls that if you paint over will not make your paint bond very well to the walls resulting in a paint job that really won't last well over time. The trick is to take a barely damp sponge (not too wet or else you disturb your joint compound) and run it over all the walls to pick up the dust

Chris and I went around the room in opposite directions while we sponged the walls and met in the middle. Then, when it was time to do the upper walls and ceiling he climbed on the ladder (even on the ladder I can barely get the center peak of the ceiling) to clean while I stayed on the ground handing him clean sponges and moving the unused ladder in front of him to climb up when he was done with each area

It was a good system that let us get the walls and ceiling cleaner, faster.

Once the walls and ceilings were clean (hooray!) it was time for the last step --> cleaning and emptying the bookcases

Which actually took a bit longer than either of us thought because we have a lot of books (and these are just the ones in the front room)

Once all the books were off it was time to sponge the very dusty shelves

And THEN it was time to declare the room paint ready!