#Stanley90sreno week 2 update: wall repair, texture, and painting the entire house

#Stanley90sreno week 2 update: wall repair, texture, and painting the entire house

• 10.25.2016

It is amazing how far we've come in less than 2 weeks of owning our house. I'm calling this the week 2 update but really the week 1 one was only a few days in. We've made SO much progress! I bet you'll even be able to tell from these photos!

We wanted to paint right away, but the walls were so damaged we had to do a massive effort of patching and texturing first.

We filled holes with 40-minute setting compound ("hot mud"), which we had to wait to dry for a day. Some areas were just large nail, drywall screw, or screw holes, but in other places we had actual holes (such as three in the master bedroom, one with the postive end of a storebought extension cord coming out of it, no idea why!!) and we covered up some old cable outlets, so we filled things with spray foam and had to wait for that to dry before hot mudding.

Once sanded, the hot mud is really smooth.

So many holes and old patch jobs! How could they hang so many things on the walls?!?

In some places the walls had been poorly patched with some rough kind of concrete. These were almost impossible to sand with the oribital sander. We covered them up with hot mud and did our best to blend them.

It took a couple days (and several volunteers while we were at work! #sograteful) to get everything filled, hot mudded, and sanded smooth. And the sanding made a huge mess everywhere.

Then Saturday morning, we were able to texture! My uncle is a pro at most thing home reno so he loaned us tools and gave us lots of help and advice on all of this. He had a sprayer that we used for texturing the smooth areas to blend with the rest of the walls. We sprayed joint compound on all the smooth areas in a texture that we actually got pretty close to the original.

Some areas needed lots of patches of it! We blended it between patches.

Then Sunday morning, most of the joint compound texture was dry so we were able to paint. (I asked if we needed to prime the new texure; uncle said no. And we were on a tight timeline so we went with it.)

Oh, also--ideally we would have painted the trim first, but I have big plans for that trim and it will take more coats and time than we had. We really wanted to get the whole house painted first so we can start to move in--we can paint the trim a little more gradually.

We taped off all the trim, light fixtures, and rooms we weren't spraying in (bathrooms, kitchen) and used my uncle's airless paint sprayer. We went through 21 gallons of paint. (We had to go back to the paint store twice to get more 5-gallon buckets.)

The paint sprayer is amazing for painting big areas, and since our ceilings and walls are the same color (Benjamin Moore White). One person sprays; another follows along with a roller to even things out.

The paint overspray gets everywhere so I literally tied a plastic bag on my head to protect my hair. How cool do I look??

My uncle did most of the spraying cause he said I was too slow. That's okay, I had plenty of other things to do. We actually had my parents, my coworker, and Jason and my uncle there that day working on stuff. And we got ALL the painting done between 10:30am and 3:40pm, not including taping prep and sprayer clean-up! Isn't that bonkers?!? The airless sprayer is SO fast!! And it put a pretty good coat on there, so we will only need to do spot touch-ups rather than a full second coat.

We turned all the fans on and are airing out the house now. We'll go over after work this week and work on getting carpet staples up and re-installing closet rods, etc. (and hopefully some fab new light fixtures!! Watch my IG stories, I already shared a peek!) after work. Next weekend the goal is to sand, prime, and maybe even paint the trim.

We did have one setback Friday evening... as we were loading the dumpster we ordered with the old baseboards and carpet we'd pulled out last weekend, I stepped on one of the long nails in a small piece of carpet tack strip as it was getting dark and rainy and I was wearing TOMS. Bad idea, I know. Luckily the urgent care clinic was a mile away and we were out of there in less than 30 minutes with a clean foot and a tetanus shot. Hoping that's our only medical emergency this project!!

I have been sharing a bunch of behind-the-scenes on my Instagram (mostly stories), so definitely go follow me over there if you're interested!

Any tips for removing carpet staples or sanding oak trim and doors? ;)