The haunting of the rooster room. Oh yeah, and your room is ready!

Do you remember the Rooster Room? It was our guest bedroom, kindly left for us, as is, by the generous Mrs. S. when we purchased the house. It's been named the Rooster Room because it is absolutely filled with rooster and chicken items. All of the pictures on the walls are roosters or chickens (approximately 10 of these!), the plates (2) are roosters or chickens, even the clock is a rooster cock. The witty Mrs. S. was not unaware of the possibly nicknames for that room (giggle.)Our first week here we slept in that room while we frantically tried to get the master bedroom ready for habitation (aka get the smoke smell out.) If you don't remember it, here it is.

First of all, we removed all the furniture and pictures, filled and sanded the imperfections in the walls, pulled out the carpet, and then primed. But a funny thing happened at that point. Well, not so funny maybe. We noticed, immediately after finishing priming, that the spare bedroom smelled like Kentucky Fried Chicken.

No joke.

So we closed the door. We left it for a couple of days. It really was not a nice smell. We were hoping it would go away. It didn't. I think it even got worse.

I took it as a sign from the roosters that they were done with that room and would not be returning. That's okay with me! Actually, I took it to mean that they were dead. So I painted the trim and Ian helped with the ceiling, and then I painted over the primed walls. I've become a painting-machine!

Luckily, the smell went away.

Next we pulled out the underpadding. We have been leaving it on while we've painted because it doesn't touch the trim (so we don't have to worry about trying to paint around it) and it protects the wood floors underneath from the occassional rogue paint drip (or light splattering that occurs every time we prime.) Unfortunately, as with our bedroom, we discovered a huge paint splotch (is that a word?) on the wood floors when we pulled the underpadding out. The master bedroom had a lot of paint on the wood floors, but luckily the rest of the house has been alright so far.

But I'm getting good at this house reno stuff. I tackled it with my chisel and 0000 steel wool. I tried a putty knife  and although it works well on the light small splatter spots, it wasn't really doing anything on this big splotch. After two days, this is the outcome.

I'm pretty happy with it actually. The floor will have to be re-varnished, but I'm okay with that.
I washed the curtains, and they shrunk. And they're double layers. And only the outer yellow fabric shrunk, not the white liner fabric behind it. So it looks dumb. We'll have to get new curtains. All the other bedding is still sitting downstairs in the laundry room, unwashed since we moved in. I don't plan on using it. I'll probably wash it and donate it, except for two possibly wool spare blankets that were on the beds. I think I'll wash and keep those. We bought new bedding just before New Years because we were having our first overnight guests!

So, it's done.

Well, almost...

We'll have to get a new curtain, I wouldn't mind getting a rug, the lamp shades need some attention, and we'd like to hang some artwork. Hanging artwork on our freshly patched and painted walls seems to be the hardest thing for us to grapple with. First off, picking out nice artwork that you can live with forever isn't easy. Ian's got lots of photographs we'd like to use, but how do you even decide? And then there's the part about putting holes in our lovely walls. We just filled all those holes! That's the worst part I think. We do have SOME pictures to hang on walls but so far haven't been able to bring ourselves to put a single one up. So we just stare at our bare walls. Good thing we like the paint colours.

So when are you coming to visit?