My New Bedroom

The master bedroom is the only room in the house that has a drywall ceiling. I'm not sure why. It has (what else!) paneled walls, but these walls are painted. There is also (what else!) 1970's linoleum on the floor. It's extremely filthy in this room. It's also shaped weird. Eighteen feet long and only 7'10" wide. There's no closet. There are two bedrooms upstairs, but (thank God) the upstairs is all painted off white and it's actually in good shape.

I keep thinking about what we are going to do for flooring in this room. We thought about carpet and maybe laminate. One night, while laying in bed wondering what I was thinking when we decided to do this, it
dawned on me: What's under that linoleum? The house was built in 1890, so chances are there are hardwood floors in there. I couldn't wait to find out so the next day I went there after work. The linoleum was broken I just pulled it up and SCORE! Hardwood floors. I was thrilled. They will need to be sanded down but they have the hand scraped look that is so expensive to get. We also figured out why the room is so long and skinny. You can see on the floor where a wall used to be. This was actually two super small bedrooms and they took the wall out.

Since this is going to be our bedroom we figured we'd just paint over the already painted paneling and call it good. That will save us some money and time not having to buy or hang drywall. We took out the flooring first and it was just tacked down on the edges so it was very quick and easy. The newspapers underneath (which also protected the hardwood) told us this flooring had been there since 1970.

Purple is my favorite color, and when I told my hubby I wanted to paint the room purple he was surprisingly OK with it. (He must love me). Since it was already painted we decided to try and just paint without primer. Prep work took awhile longer than usual because we sanded all the walls with a pole sander and filled in all the screw holes and cracks with caulk. There were a lot. For paint colors we chose BEHR Ash Violet and used BEHR Simplicity for an accent wall. The guy at Home Depot didn't ask which type of BEHR I wanted so I ended up with the paint and primer in one which cost $32 a gallon. I'm SO glad we did. This stuff is amazing. I am in love with this paint and we are going to use it throughout the rest of the house. It covered everything in one coat. I got eggshell finish because I knew it would be more forgiving of flaws and it was. I'm so glad we took the time to prep because it looked so much better with all the cracks and holes filled. A painter once told me never to skimp out on paint. It's a rule we've always followed and it's never done me wrong so far. The few more bucks you pay for paint is well worth it in the long run. Not only is it durable, it looks better and covers better too. We painted the ceiling with BEHR ceiling paint. That took two coats and we sanded in between coats. It turned out very nice as well. The window casings in this room did not match. I suspect when the windows were replaced they put in a smaller one on one wall so both windows were the same size, and then just covered up the gaps that were left with wider window trim. Well, we decided to paint the window and door trim the same color as the walls. I'm glad we did because then the different didn't stand out like it did before.

We still have to sand down and finish the floors and add baseboards (there are none), but I'm really happy how this room turned out.

Total Spent

$20- Ceiling paint
$47- Wall paint
$4- Caulk
$20- Misc. Supplies