off-white walls (what I’ve been doing the last 3 months)

Yo, when I posted this pic up three months ago, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The bf suggested we turn a spare room into an office, and I was all, ‘Yeah, aiiite, but only if we get rid of this ugly wall paper,’ thinking, how hard can it be? We’ll just google some wall-paper removal tutorials, and slap a coat of paint over after that and, bam, we’re done, right? Oh, lawd, how wrong I was. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve been to Mitre 10, thinking we’d gotten all the tools we needed, only to find we needed to make another trip. We were such damn n00bs. If you know the bf and I, you’d know we’re the last people you’d expect to undertake a home D.I.Y project, so it’d be no surprise it took us so damn long, nor will it be a surprise how it all went down :

We first tried to soak the wallpaper off, and then realised we needed to score the paper, and THEN soak it and then pull it off, and then use a scraper to scrape off all the bitty ass bits that were still stuck to the wall, and then, oh shit, fill in all the holes we’d put into the wall from scraping all the bitty ass bits off, and then sand all the putty down, and then fill all the cracks between the walls, and watch some more youtube vids on how to remove that weird sparkly/speckly ceiling stuff that used to be the wave back in the day, scrape that off, and then wash all the walls, cover the carpet, tape all the architraves/skirting before we paint the walls with a coat of primer. At which point I decide to go ahead and paint two coats of paint onto the walls once the primer is dry, cos I’ve made the executive decision that, FX$K IT, – we’re not going to paint the skirting, cos it’s too much work, and it’s OK that the paint is peeling and won’t be the same colour, honestly, I’m OK with it, we’re OK with it, honest bro! And then realising that no, we’re actually not OK with it, and actually do need to paint the architraves and skirting, and also realising, well shit, we probably should have sanded all the skirting BEFORE we painted the damn walls. And also realising we wouldn’t have had to have taped up all the skirting if we’d only realised this earlier. Then buying a cute ass lil sanding machine to sand all that shit down, then realising I need to buy sand-paper refills, then realising we probably needed to remove the door if we were gonna sand and paint around that too, then you-tubing ‘how to remove a door’, then removing the door, and painting around it, and then trying to put the door back on, and it not fitting, and then realising it was upside down, turning it around, and putting the door back on, and then taping the carpet so we can paint the skirting, and then paint the ceiling, and then, and then, and THEN *deep breath* finishing it all this weekend. YAYYYYYYY. It probs would have only taken us (or more capable souls) a week or two max if we’d worked on it full time, but you know, such is life. NOW I CAN DECORATE wooooooooo!!!! I keep going into the room to look at our empty future-office and pretty off-white walls. Such satisfaction, such achievement feels, such team work (thanks babe) !

P.S I googled Mitre 10 so many times over the course of this lil DIY exercise that Mitre 10 ads come up on every youtube video I watch now. But I ain’t even mad, cos those ads are helpful as lol.

P.P.S The staff at Mitre 10 Botany and Manukau are awesome and were SO helpful. (In case you’re wondering, I’m not being paid to big-up Mitre 10, though I kinda wish I was cos I spent hella money there haha. It was just the first place we thought of going, and we kept going cos the service was good.)

The. End. / Never again, bro. Never again.