Better Pictures of the Dining Room

I wanted to take more pictures of the newly primed living room today after I moved everything out and cleaned the floors, because the last round made us look pretty sloppy. These also are during daylight, so that helps a lot too. Sorry for the quality of the photos. Gretchen took the camera with her to her parents this weekend and all I had was my phone.

Primed

After a few days of forcing ourselves to work on the dining room after work we’ve finally “finished” the room and have it ready for paint, which we’re going to hold off on until we have all of the walls downstairs ready. So now it’s onto the living room again. Just one wall of paper to finish stripping and then the sanding/spackling/sanding/spackling/sanding/priming/spackling/sanding/priming routine starts in there. That’s pretty much what it came down to in the dining room. There were a few rough spots that we did a fairly good job of smoothing out. It’s still not perfect, but I’m okay with that. I am. I am okay with that.

Here are some pictures:

We really like the way the archways have turned out now that the walls are primed. They needed a good amount of resurfacing with spackle and joint compound. But after a few coats of that and some sanding, they look great. The lines are clean, and the primer makes them look sharp.

Another shot of an archway

We’re still not exactly sure what we’re going to do with the water pipes that run down the wall in the dining room and living room. The had been wallpapered (why?) and the wallpaper over time burnt onto the pipes because they are hot water pipes. We were able to peel a lot of it off, and I sanded a small section of it with a fine grain sandpaper and it actually looks pretty good, so we’re considering cleaning them off and polishing them to their natural copper color. Not sure though. They also make high temperature paint, so we could paint them if we wanted to, but the color selection for that kind of paint is limited, so they probably wouldn’t be able to match the walls.

Disclaimer: This is something I’ve been avoiding for a while, but to give an idea of what the whole room looks like I have to allow you to see the condition of the room as a whole. It’s pretty terrible. Because none of the rooms are “done” we don’t really have anything arranged or cleaned, everything is just sort of piled in the middle of this room so we could take down the paper, but rest assured, now that the walls are primed we’ll be cleaning this room up some and bring the furniture in from the living room so we can seal that room off and start sanding. Anyway, here it is:

That’s a curtain on top of a bunch of boxes on top of a shelf with an old kitchen table mixed in.

Next up, the living room.

What we’ve been listening to while doing this room:
Johnny Cash Pandora Station
This American Life Podcast