The carpet had been ripped up, but there were staples all over the floor. The tack board around the perimeter and floor trim needed to be pulled up as well. We saved the trim to reuse so all the nails had to be pulled from it. The blinds on the windows were cheap vinyl blinds that the cats had ruined (they had ruined every set of blinds in the house except one bathroom). The cats had also damaged the door jambs of all the doors upstairs too. This particular bedroom was very bad. We weren't sure if the doors would need to be replaced or if they could be repaired with wood filler. Since we happened to have some filler on hand, we tried that first. It required patience and letting several layers build up, but it worked and we discovered we'd be able to salvage all of the interior doors.
There was still a subtle odor from the cats so we wanted to be sure to use a primer with a vapor barrier. We did a fair amount of research and discovered that Zinsser oil-based primer seemed to be a favorite among the flippers on the internet boards. Since they steered me in the right direction with the ozone generator I was very happy to embrace the love and go with the popular primer.
Until we opened the can, anyway. Wow, them's some fumes! I couldn't hack it. Several times I started feeling light headed and dizzy and when I bent over one time I thought I was going to face plant into the floor. I bailed on the priming and sat outside for the rest of the night trying to make the world stop spinning. Ok, so by rest of the night I mean about an hour, but it was long enough for me to decide that we could not use that same primer throughout the entire house. Not to mention that cleaning up oil-based paint is a royal
We let the girls pick out their paint colors with minimal direction. My youngest loves green, all shades of green, and I fully expected her room to be green and purple with touches of yellow and pink in the accessories. To help the girls get a vision for their room, I took them to the how-to book section at Home Depot and flipped through a book on kids' rooms. I was so surprised when she picked out a room that was pink with orange and yellow. She also liked one that was purple, so we decided to paint the walls pink, the dormer walls purple, and then paint a desk and dresser in green.
The only difficult part of painting the upstairs rooms was the 9' ceilings. I simply can't reach, even on a small step stool. This meant much of the painting fell on my husband's shoulders. Sorry, guy!
After we painted ceilings and walls, we installed the flooring that the girls picked out. It is a laminate from Home Depot that was mid-range in quality but only $1.30 a square foot. We found that Big Lots seemed to have better quality underlayment for a cheaper price so we opted for that. The flooring went down pretty quickly, with just a few complex cuts. Most of it could be done with the powered miter box (great Father's Day gift, btw). A few boards required being ripped down on the table saw which was a hassle since that meant trekking up the hill to H1 to cut them and hope the measurements were right the first time.
I would like to see a shelf built around most of the room where the wall meets the angled portion of the ceiling for all my daughter's stuffed animals. I'd also like to see some trim on the ceiling. There is a rectangular area around the light fixture which is somewhat sunken. It is the result of amateur mudding when we built the house and I think decorative molding would enhance the room as well as disguise the flaw. It isn't a big deal, though, probably not noticeable to most people, and definitely a project that can wait.
Still needs to be done:
window hardware, painted furniture, decor, final cleaning once the dust in the rest of the house has settled.
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