Thursday, July 22, 2010

Before and After

So, some of you have written and asked me why I would put so much effort (not to mention money) into upgrading a house I don't even own.

Let me show you.


This was Amelia's room before. This was the catalyst. I hadn't seen the house in person yet--my friend had gone to look at it for me and took pictures. I told the owners that we would only take the house if we could paint over the murals. This is only a small part. Nearly every wall in the room had cartoon characters or crooked blue stripes on them. So, this is where the insanity began.


Here's Amelia's room after.


This was the living room before. It's impossible to tell from this picture, but that paint is peachy orange. And yes, that's red and gold cording hot glued around the ceiling.


And the living room after.

So, this was where the painting was supposed to end. The house was empty a few days before we could leave Georgia, so my awesome friend agreed to go over and get these two rooms painted for us before we got there. I know. You totally wish you had a friend that awesome. Anyway, once she was in the house and able to see it empty--you know, without the previous tenant's copious amounts of crap everywhere--she started seeing things that had been missed when she (and I!) had walked through it previously. So, we expanded the paint project to include two more rooms:


This is the room that would be Liam and Ben's. Not only did it have hideous border, but if you click on the picture, you'll see that it was randomly painted with two slightly different shades of paint.

The boys' room after.


I don't have a lot of pictures of the master bedroom before, but this is one of the windows. Let's just say it's a very accurate representation of the whole room.


The master bedroom after. That's right. This is where the magic happens.
(I'll give you a minute to locate your brain bleach now.)

O.K., so again, this is where the painting was supposed to stop. But you see, by this point I got there and saw the house in person. I had seen it in person back in May, but it was completely full to bursting with the previous renter's stuff. And she was a little...crazy...and we could tell she was uncomfortable with us being there so we went through it quickly and got out of there ASAP. So, we missed a lot of this stuff.

Anyway, the four rooms my friend had done looked so good that it made the rest of the house look really rough. It would have looked rough anyway, but it was kind of like when I got my tummy tuck. My abs looked pretty good afterward, but suddenly my thighs looked worse than ever.

So, I basically said, "Oh screw it. I don't care if I hate painting. I'm painting this whole freakin' house." And thus ensued 10 days of painting and cleaning torture.

The dining room before. The picture doesn't do it justice. That wall was a dark, chocolate brown, and had been slapped up with no taping or anything. It was on the ceiling. On the molding. On the wall that was supposed to be white. And that light. I've seen very few things uglier than that.

The dining room after.


The chalkboard wall before. Check out that awesome border.
And more gold cording hot glued to the wall.

Chalkboard wall after.


This was the bonus room before. Or half of it, anyway. It's a huge room. Anyway, it had more of the dark chocolate brown slapped on (again, with no taping or edging). They even painted over picture hangers.

The bonus room after.

I also painted a half bathroom, two hallways, the stairwell and the kitchen, but this is too long already. Oh, and I scraped wallpaper border off the master bathroom walls. That job sucked. Luckily, the same awesome friend who helped with the painting knew some tricks that made it suck slightly less. Plus, she helped me do it.

Anyway, there you have it. This is what kept me away for nearly three weeks. It was a ton of work, but the rent is cheap, and the house has good space and is in an awesome area, and now that the work is done, it was totally worth the time and effort.

Just don't ask me to help you paint because the answer will be no.







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