The Entry

The entry is almost finished! We just have a few switch plates to change out and of course furnish it, and then we're good! I'm going to be posting the pictures, but Tony was much more involved in the actual taking down of the wallpaper and refinishing the walls. Without his mad skim coat skills, the walls would seriously look like crap. So, I'll let him explain on the picture captions below...

Entry during the inspection.

Entry during the inspection

Entry on first day of move-in

The wallpaper seemed like it was in pretty good shape and fairly new, so I thought that it wouldn't be too hard to take down. I was wrong. It turned out that the people who put it up had skim coated the wall and then went straight to putting up the wallpaper without properly sizing. So after many hours of peeling small strips of wallpaper with Annie's Mom's magical steam gun, we noticed that the surface of the wall now looked like the surface of the moon. If we would have painted it as-is it would have looked awful, so I decided to skim coat the wall again. I went with a pre-mixed finishing joint compound which turned out to go on fairly easy and sand easy as well. It was still my first time ever skim coating a wall so I did my fair share of sanding. With the exception of a few rough spots around the light switches, the walls came out looking pretty good.

Entry after skim coat added to even out the walls

Entry after skim coat was added to even out the walls

First layer of wall paint (New York State of Mind), no trim paint yet.

As you can see from the caption above Annie keeps referring to this paint as New York State of Mind. Well, that is only 90% correct. We decided that the original New York State of Mind was too dark so we went 10% lighter. By doing this, it is now a new paint color, deserving of it's own name. The paint was named Papa Smurf Blue by the clerk who mixed it at Allied Paints in Topeka.  Annie refuses to acknowledge that he named it this.

(Almost) finished entry. Wall paint and trim paint done.

(Almost) finished entry. Wall paint and trim paint done.

(Almost) finished entry. Wall paint (New York State of Mind) and trim (Mascarpone) finished, still waiting on a few details and of course furniture.

This chandelier was from the previous owner. We cleaned it up a little, and while it is kind of dated and has fake wax dripping from the "candles" (aka light bulbs)...we actually like it and it is staying.

Due to the overwhelming amount of snow that we got yesterday, everything looked blue outside last night. It was the craziest thing. This is a view out the front door window of the blue outside.