Oh yeah, I’m still alive! I’ve been focused more on uploading the tons of gaming clips I’ve pulled from my PS4 rather than putting together posts on here. I’ve also just generally been pretty lazy of late. But today I’ve decided I should at least finish off the string of posts I’ve made about our living room. You know what that means: painting.
Now, painting isn’t horribly hard but it can be costly depending on the quality of paint you choose and the amount of real estate you need to cover. Our “Marwitz Mini Mansion” (we’re very humble people) has a fairly large living room by our standards which means it takes a bit of cash to cover. I didn’t actually keep track but our best estimate is that it took us 4 gallons of paint to cover our living room. We’ve been using Valspar Premium Interior paint + primer that we get at our local Ace for $30/gallon.The nice thing is they have a $5 tester can that then gets you $5 off the gallon so you can try it out, plus they have a “love it or leave it” sort of thing where you can switch colors at a reduced cost if you don’t like the original color. Honestly, we were just using it because it was low VOC and had the colors we wanted. As with most of our house painting, Ali did the lions share of the work.
Luckily we have a janky ladder that I’m pretty sure I only paid $5 for, helps with the high ceilings.
Around this time we also had some issues with our electric range tripping the breaker anytime it was used for more than maybe 10 minutes. That was covered under our home warranty so I called the company and they had an electrician out to take a look. They ended up just replacing the breaker which did about as much as you’d imagine. In the end (and after about a month of me telling them it still wasn’t fixed) they came out and replaced the breaker with a higher rated breaker and also ran thicker gauge wiring from the panel to the range. We stress tested that by turning on all the range functions for a good 5 minutes. Still runs without issue!
We also got a free couch from my parents as one of my dads friends was trying to get rid of it, it’s nearly new and has a fold out queen size sleeper that we’ve since used for multiple parties. The trundle bed we were using as a couch ended up in one of the spare bedrooms that is still undergoing construction (but is nearly complete!). Of course, since the living room is large and we wanted something that fit the house a little more, we ended up picking up an additional older couch on Craigslist for $125. They’re no longer in the same configuration as in the picture below, but it’s nice to have the extra seat space. I will say we’re still experimenting with layout to try and make it easier for friends to gather around the TV rather than shoving some off into a corner with a couch.
It took two coats in most areas and three in others to get things looking good. We worked on painting consistently for a few days and it drastically improved the look and feel of the living room. Plus, painting is kind of the capstone of the wallpaper removal process and it feels so damn good to slap a coat on and never have to worry about wallpaper in that room again.
That’s all I’ve got for painting the living room. It’s pretty straight forward though if I were to give one tip it would be to pick up an edger. It’s definitely worth it to avoid painting trim. Tape works pretty well but a little extra insurance keeps you from having to remove that paint later on.
Other lessons learned: our cabinets in the kitchen get really cold in the Winter as they’re on an outside facing wall. Cold apparently does odd things to honey, like causing it to form air bubbles and become sort of an icy slush. Which then caused it to pop it’s lid and get honey all over the inside of the cupboard it was in.
BONUS! Here’s a cat and the birds I mentioned last time.
Shout out to the people who are finding my site and reading it! I’ve had a few people reach out on the site or through Facebook and I’m glad my site’s been useful. Until next time.