The "Den Bedroom"

This is the "den bedroom" before we moved in.

It is a bedroom, technically, but Mrs. S. used it as a den, and we'll probably have a similar use for it for a while. So we'll call it the "den bedroom." The door to the room has been removed, and we have no immediate plans to replace it. Also, she had a curtain hung over the closet, in which she had yet another set of four storage shelves. She's left us more storage shelves than we know what to do with, no kidding! I never thought I'd say that. And as a special treat, she left us her stereo: an old tape player, record player, blown speakers, and even German Christmas albums, on good ol' fashion cassette tapes of course! Luckily, Ian has held on to the box of records he found in the garbage room of our old apartment, so we'll have records to play on our record player! And this is how hoarding starts... 

So once all her stuff had been moved out, the den bedroom became our upstairs storage area. This is where we seemed to dump stuff we didn't want to put downstairs, didn't know what to do with, or were using but didn't want in the living room (like all of the painting or repair tools we were using at the moment.) After I moved all of that storage stuff into various closests, and found new homes for the other stuff I didn't know what to do with, this is what the room looked like. 

 You can really see the smoke stains on the walls in these shots. This is what pretty much the whole house looked like, if you didn't see it before.

After I pulled off this wall paper, which happened to not be 30 years old like the rest of the house, but 15 or 20 years old (I can't remember, but whoever hung the paper had written their name and the year on the wall underneath it, and I thought I took a picture of it, but now I can't find it so I guess I didn't...) Anyways, after pulling down the wallpaper, this is what I ended up with. 

And this bright, lemony yellow paint, covered with wall paper glue of course. 

So my intentions were to leave the paint on the walls, and patch the areas that had water damage, or had flaked off for other various reasons. That way we wouldn't have to fill all the gouges the scrapers end up leaving in the walls, and we wouldn't have to worry about the cracks in the plaster bubbling up in the primer, like it did really badly in the dining room. But after wetting the walls and trying to scrape the glue off for about ten minutes, and making pretty much no progress, Ian and I decided to take the paint off instead, like we ended up doing in much of the rest of the house. It's still not an easy job, but it beats scraping the glue off. 

Now paint is done. I re-hung the original curtains, just until we have some money to get new curtains. Still needs 1/4 round on the floors. And we're going to be building a desk in the closet, to keep the printer/scanner upstairs, and giving us an area to use our laptops, if we want. And we're going to need to work on the furniture.. And one day, a rug. Probably this will become the TV room for a while, too, because neither of us want the big TV in the living room. Maybe a smaller one, some day. All in due time, right? Always a work in progress...

Funny how the colour looks very similar to the paint that was under the wall paper. It's not the same colour though, I think it's just the light. It's a much warmer yellow, not so lemony.. (I keep saying that, don't I?)

The floors in this room were the absolute best in the entire house. They're gorgeous. I love them. Couldn't have asked for more.

Sooo that's all the painting on the main floor DONE!!!! Until we get the crown moulding and 1/4 roudn in anyways... Then I'll have some more to do with that, and I have various touch ups to do around the house, also! But YAY!!! In 5 months we managed to get the whole main floor livable, where I can touch any wall, or walk around in bare feet, without feeling like I have to go sanitize myself afterwards! 

This is the view from the den bedroom. It's the perfect place to sit and watch the birds. It's also the Cardinal's favourite window.