Though we are still hoping to sell the house Tricia and I decided to paint the nursery so we can be sure the baby has a warm, comfortable nursery.
First, I started emptying the room and removing the various pieces and parts that needed to go before painting. And that's when I got my first surprise.
Bees! About two years ago bees had gotten into the house through an unblocked hole and we never figured out how they got in... Well now we know.
After vacuuming out the bees, I continued cleaning and everything seemed back on track, until ADD kicked in. I found that two small cracks on the wall seemed to be coming up around the edge. I decided to keep chipping and peeling until I got to solid plaster. It seemed to make sense until I found that I had chipped off about square feet of plaster in two different sections of the wall.
Still, the Internet came to the rescue. After reading about fixing plaster walls and a trip to Ace Hardware, I was able to purchase plaster and a texture spray to fix my mess. I cleaned up the cracks that caused the issue and spent the first evening filling and smoothing the plaster.
Early Saturday morning I was able to add the texture to match the old sections of the wall. Tricia had picked out the colors of the room. She decided to have a two-color design with a lighter color on top and a darker color below, separated by a chair rail. Since the top color was supposed was above the drying texture I was able to start painting.
At the same time, I had also retrieved an old bookshelf I'd had for years. It was partially painted and so the day before I sanded and primed it. I decided to use the same paint as the room, painting the outside the darker color and the inside the lighter color. Painting was painstaking, but kept me busier than watching the paint on the wall dry.
After some pretty repetitive paint cycles I was able to paint both the top and bottom colors on the wall and the entire bookshelf. Once I had the paint finished, I put up the chair rail and filled and painted it.
It was a long, long weekend, but the nursery is now beautiful and ready for our baby.
