Paint Hallway: Check

photo credit: matthew moss

What a week.
I can knock off another one of my Things to Do Before I'm 32 thanks to a friend who took on the horrific task of painting our hallway. We paid him but he did it for a helluva lot cheaper than anyone else would have: what a freaking nightmare.

We bought our house four years ago from a family who bought the house 4 years earlier from the builder. The house was a model home originally. What have we learned about model homes in the last year? Model homes = shortcuts. My guess is the builder wants the house up fast in order to show it and therefore puts the pressure on the contractors to get things happening quickly. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the contractors just suck and it has nothing to do with the builder. Either way we have been finding little things here and there that are the result of lazy contractors and it's annoying. The latest find has been the most expensive so far (thankfully) and I'm seriously hoping it's the last 'surprise'. The insert whatever rude name you choose here who put up the wallpaper chose to skip priming the walls and stuck the wallpaper directly to the drywall. Brilliant.

For those of you who are thinking the same thing I originally was, "so what?", the issue is that you can't remove the wallpaper like you typically would because applying water to the wallpaper means also soaking the drywall which doesn't like water. Drywall and water pretty much equals mud and falling down walls.

We couldn't leave the wallpaper up because it was beginning to peel at all the seams and this has been one of the top things on our TO DO list for quite some time so we decided to bite the bullet and TO DID it. A job we knew would be a pain in the ass turned out to be a ROYAL pain in the ass. The facing had to be pulled off the walls leaving a fuzzy paper base, that base then had to be painted with oil based primer in order to seal it, this left us with fuzzy primed walls which had to be sanded. The sanding led to a house covered in teeny tiny particles of oil based paint dust. Lovely.

One week later (he thought it would take 1.5 days) I felt like a gypsy living out of bags and spare room surfing (thanks to the fumes) but our wallpaper was down, paint was up and the house was covered in oil based paint dust. Today the house is finally looking better - we spent 5 hours yesterday cleaning up every tiny piece of dust we could find: the spring cleaning I never got around to this year has now been taken care of.

PHEW!