The Painting Challenge: Week Two ORC

It took two days but the fireplace is finally primed.

It is week two of the fall 2020 One Room Challenge. I want to thank Linda at the @OneRoomChallenge and the media partner @BetterHomesandGardens for this opportunity.

Here is a link to the before pictures of my project that I revealed in week one.

Well week two is when I typically share my mood board for the project I am taking on. But sadly, this time, no mood board and no plan yet. EEEk. I am still having trouble with samples, so I am hesitant to commit to a colour strategy just yet.

Instead of the One Room Challenge, I am going to call this week the painting challenge. Read on.

The first thing I did, and this is gross, is that I sprayed for spiders. I have mentioned before, that because we live near the water, we have a ton of spiders. Mostly big spindly daddy longlegs. So I did a big spray and am hoping for the best. And even though our basement does not seem damp, I have been running a dehumidifier as less humidity in the air helps the spiders and the people.

The next thing I tackled was some wall fixes. We had a hole from when we did a project upstairs. We had also had a flood in the kitchen three years ago and the water seeped into the basement and wrecked the drywall in one place, so I fixed that as well.

The next project was removing the old baseboards. That was not a big project but it was good to get it out of the way. I felt like a boss with my crowbar in hand.

This is me with a crow bar pulling up baseboards like a boss.

We started working on installing the new baseboards. Hubby even let me use his saw a few times. Well lots of you are using power tools like pros, my hubby just says that he will cut things for me, so I am having a hard time moving ahead on that front.

We got these baseboards in a package at Home Depot for a really good price. They are smaller than I wanted but hubby is installing them 3/4 of an inch off the floor so the carpet tiles will slide under and they will look taller.

I did a bit of spray painting. I spray painted the rack that holds the logs in the fireplace. It was really rusty so I put the wire brush on the drill and got rid of most of the rust. The heat resistant Rustoleum paint covered up the rust beautifully.

I was wondering if this rusty old log holder could be saved? I could not wait to get painting with heat resistant paint.

Before painting, this is me using power tools again, with a wire brush on the end of the drill to get rid of the rust.

My biggest project of the week was priming the fireplace wall. This is not a task for the faint of heart I promise you. It took almost two days. I ran out of primer and ended up emptying the other cans of primer that we had in storage to finish it off. It looks all blotchy, but I am going to call it art for now lol.

Painting the fireplace was a job and a half. I really should have used a sprayer but over two days with a roller and a brush, I got it primed.

I am going to call this blotchiness art lol, rather than the unintended result of using three different types of primer because I ran out.

I also made a big rookie mistake. I wanted to paint the inside of the fireplace so I took the spray can that I used to paint the log rack. The smell was so toxic. I was wearing a mask and when I washed my face the sink was all black. We ended up spending the rest of the day in the screened in porch to get away from the smell. I finished it up with non-toxic fireplace paint, but I will never do that again.

We will be ordering our carpet tiles today and I also ordered a stencil for the fireplace hearth. I am burying the lead, but we have hired a painter to scrape and paint the stippled ceiling and the fireplace, so that will start next week!

Well that is it for progress on my project this week. Let’s hope that next week I have a plan to show you.

Always

Leslie