I've been a tad bit busy lately undergoing a major change in our living room. I'm not quite ready to show the whole living room reveal mostly because I've still got half a wall to finish, but hold your horses... It's coming!
Up until a few weeks ago (yes this project has taken weeks. Give me a break. I have a two-year-old.) Our living room looked a lot like this...
A few things...
First of all the walls are wood paneling... You know how I hate popcorn ceilings? (of which we have no shortage of.) Wood paneling is right up there in the running for "most loathsome design choice."
Second, I don't know how well you can see it, but the seam in the corner is covered by corner bead... which I also despise.
Third the "buttercream" walls were in HORRIBLE condition... Not to mention the fact that I am not really a "buttercream" kind of girl.
So something had to be done. I wanted to drywall, but decided to do that down the line around the time we install built-ins on the wall with the chimney.
Knowing that our walls days were numbered, but not wanting to live with the look of paneling anymore, I decided to camouflage the walls.
Being rather handy with spackle and a putty knife at this point in my life I went to Lowes and bought the biggest can (tub?) of Dap brand spackle I could get. I love Dap spackle for a couple of reasons. It's a nice consistency to work with, and it goes on pink and dries white so you always know when it's dry.
I got home, armed with spackle and a determination to fill every line in the paneling to give us a smooth even surface to work with.
After getting one coat down on one wall it became abundantly clear that I was going to have to fill every single line twice. Spackle does this things sometimes when it dries... it shrinks. (Insert sad face.)
Post realization that this long, tedious work was about to get even more long, and tedious I sat down and ate a lot of ice cream. Then I got up, and decided I can't leave the job half finished, so I continued on.
Also I made my husband take down that horrible corner bead, which revealed a lovely gap where there should have been a seam. I filled that baby with a layer of paintable caulk, and trekked on.
Two layers of spackle proved to be sufficient enough to get the surface flush, and not be so much that I was left with a ton of dust when I sanded it down.
After using a fine grit sanding block I was left with a fairly flush surface which made my heart sing. I say "fairly flush" because our house is nearly 100 years old... nothing is flush.
After prepping my walls I was able to put down a gorgeous shade of blue on my walls a la Vaspar's Pacific Coast
Seriously swooning over my own space right now.
So let's get down to brass tacks, shall we? This is not an ideal solution for everyone. Anytime you have two different materials on a wall they are going to settle at different rates, which will cause cracking like plaster and drywall, or panelling and spackle. Why did I knowing this ahead of time still choose to go down this route? I am very much a visual person. I am most happy, inspired, and at ease when I am surrounded by beautiful spaces. That being said the paneling was driving me bonkers, and while the spackle was a temporary solution it was still a solution. Second we bought a nearly century old home with some piers that needed to be jacked up. We were told that this process would cause lots of cracking in our walls so keep extra paint and spackle around. I was already going to be repairing cracks anyway so the thought of cracking wasn't at all a deterrent. (In fact in our barely four months here, I've already had to repair a crack that showed up in our freshly painted bedroom. It's seriously not that big of a deal.) Third, These walls are temporary. Knowing that we would eventually drywall made choosing a $20 temporary fix that much easier.
There are definitely things to consider with choosing to camouflage your walls. I definitely wouldn't use this as a permanent solution, but it works for now, and my living room is finally a space that makes me happy... Your home should do that.
Until next time!
Hugs and kisses, and a Happy Halloween!
-Victoria
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