The Master Bedroom (so far)

Since we seem to be on the remodeling band wagon again, here's yet another post about our crazy shenanigans involving power tools and paint.

This was a tight fit.

As you know, we recently redid the master bathroom. If you missed all that craziness, you can read all about it here. We were so pleased with how that room looked that it made us heavily consider upgrading the adjoining master bedroom to kind of extend the awesomeness. To be honest, we had been thinking about it before the bathroom remodel but after we fell in love with that room it was time to act. After we moved in and demolished redid some of the other rooms in the house, we did get to the master bedroom. We painted the walls and I chose to paint the trim gray instead of white (it had been off white?) and add a "feature wall". We hadn't gotten to that whole popcorn finish removal thing on the ceilings so it stayed as did the crazy ceiling fan that threatened to kill us every summer when we turned it on.We started this party by cramming ALL
of our bedroom furniture into the master bathroom. I forgot how

The last complete before pic

Thin faux brick paneling

much I hated digging through the laundry basket like a rat in order to find clothes until this. Over the years, we've had several people ask us if the brick wall in our bedroom was real or not. The answer to that is "no", it was paneling. We really liked the brick for a while. It was different and gave sort of an urban loft like feel to the room that was very different from the rest of the house. We liked the kind of ice blue paint paired with the light gray trim, again very different than the rest of the house. It was sort of an oasis for a time, but that time had come and gone since we kinda started taking the house back to basics. So after the room was cleared out I started by taking down said paneling. I had forgotten what color the wall used to be, and also that there had been that crazy border in there. I was glad that we hadn't used more nails to secure this paneling to the wall because it came down fairly easily after I got the edge started. I would later come to hate all of the holes that I had to patch in preparation for paint, but it was all for the greater good.
Knowing what a super mess all of this was going to make, I took out a little insurance and bought some cheap plastic sheeting and covered everything that I didn't want to clean up later, including the doors and window. I was reading the Young House Love blog (I wanna be like them when I grow up) and they mentioned (just the other day in fact) that they were doing some painting and needed to contain the mess.

Tarp it instead of cleaning it!

That perfectly timed post led me to buy this crazy tarp zipper  thing seen in the picture --->
That thing was awesome! It was 110% worth the $10 that is cost. It totally kept the drywall dust and all that crap inside the room instead of letting it filter out into the rest of the house. If you have a super messy project like this that you're going to do, get you one of these bad boys! Ok, so skipping ahead a little you'll see that I got to the popcorn removal phase of this.I can't tell you how messy this is. I use the wet method of removal which means that I spray it with water using a garden sprayer to loosen it up and then I just scrape it all off back to the original drywall. This method is fairly fast, fairly easy, low dust, but again, it's wet. After I got all that mess down, we tag teamed sanding any residual stuff from the ceiling before using screws to suck the drywall back up to the ceiling and applying fresh mud to the holes, scratches, and taped joints. We have put screws in each time we have scraped a ceiling because back in the day they used nails and over time they kinda let things sag a little so we just go along side and put in screws and pound the nails tight again and move on. We're already going to be there mudding anyway, might as well do two dimples instead of one and get a better finish. Now let me insert a disclaimer here and say that we are not professional drywallers, but after the quote that I got of $500 to remove the popcorn (which took me about an hour) and $1500 to refinish it (we already had most of the stuff we needed) I don't think that it looks half bad for the $20 bag of mud and the few days it took. I'll be posting some after pics later so stay tuned. ~Kellie~

Why I'm a Swiffer Believer

Swiffer Sweeper

I hate cleaning up the house. I mostly hate it because we have 4 kids, 2 of which are home all the time, and as soon as I clean something up it's dirty again. I used to have a very clean house, almost to the OCD point, but then I got real because the number of kids in the house made it unrealistic to attempt that level of cleanliness. These days, I'm just glad if there's a path through the kid clutter and no one dies. Recently I've started to rethink the level of clean in the house, mostly because the baby is somewhat mobile and he eats a lot of crackers and such and there are far more crumbs on the floor than there should be. It's like Logan's in here only it's cracker crumbs instead of peanut shells. I decided that it needed to be cleaned more often, but in keeping with my realistic side I determined that whatever method I used needed to be quick and easy because daily use was a must. I want to insert a little disclaimer here and say that I tried to use reusable microfiber stuff to dust and clean the floor, but then I had to clean what I used to clean and that meant more cleaning and they never came all the way clean anyway and so I just stopped cleaning so much. I finally just gave in to the notion that whatever I used to clean needed to be disposable so that when I was done I was done and I could move on and not deal with that particular mess again. I started with the regular Swiffer Sweeper thing, I think it's just called a "Sweeper". I gotta tell you that with the messes in this house, that poor thing didn't stand a chance. I actually felt sorry for it. After cleaning about half the floor, that thing was not only too clogged to pick up anything else, it was pushing a huge pile of crumbs and miscellaneous that I then had to clean up and dispose of. Remember what I said about hating to clean up after I clean up? It was time for more aggressive action. I pondered other Swiffer options because I like how light and easy and fast it is to clean up

Swiffer Sweep & Trap

what you need to clean up. I pondered the jumbo size of the Sweeper, and though it was larger and would clean more of the floor at a time, it saw still going to be pushing a pile of crumbs. Not what I was going for. I thought about trying the Swiffer Sweep and Trap which has this little rubber paddle thing in it and the cloth thing rides along behind and gets the little stuff. In theory this would work because it's the equivalent of those little sweeper things that restaurants use on their low pile carpets and they seem to do ok, but the thought of all those crumbs stuck to the rubber thing and having to clean that off... nope, not going there. I then pondered the Swiffer SweeperVac but I wasn't sure if it would work either.

Swiffer SweeperVac

I stood in Wal-Mart staring at it wondering if it was worth the $40. I'm cheap, I don't want to spent money on something unless I know it's going to suit my needs. As I was standing there pondering, baby in cart, this older lady cruises up with her cart, grabs one of the vacs and tosses it in her cart. This was my chance! As she took a few steps back to the handle of her cart I asked her if she'd ever used one of them before. She said yes, she'd had one for six years and it finally died so she was replacing it. She stated that the battery was made into it and that it had a cord to charge it and that hers just wouldn't charge anymore. I figured six years was a pretty fair length of time for something that cost $40, and the fact that she was buying another one spoke volumes. Since we had this conversation going, I asked her about the vacuum ability, mainly does it work? She said that it was great for crumbs and little things, and that while it wouldn't pick up a pebble it certainly had enough power to be a first line of defense for little light things. SOLD! I've been using this product for a couple weeks now and I love it! The battery stays charged long enough for me to do all of downstairs before it dies. We have a pretty big area to do so I think that's pretty good. I haven't timed it to see how long it really works non stop, but I'd guess a good 15-20 minutes? I'll have to time it next time and report back in. I'm loving that it really does pick up grass clippings, crumbs, hair, lint, dirt, etc. It certainly helps prolong the life of the cleaning pad which saves money. I also love that when I'm done using it I don't have to sweep up a pile of crap that it's left behind so that's less of a hassle. While we're on the subject of cleaning up

Swiffer Wet Jet

I will add that I also posses a Swiffer Wet Jet and I love it too. It's great for cleaning up splattered milk when the baby throws his sippy cup off the high chair or leaves it tipped over so that it dribbles on the floor. I'm loving not having to drag out the mop or get out paper towels and a spray cleaner for 3 drips of milk. Since I am cheap, I will admit that I refill the bottle with my own concoction of cleaner which seems to work just as well as theirs. Floor cleaner and water, yep, that'll do pig. Now I'll admit that while I do think that the vac thing replaces a broom for most applications, and that the Wet Jet takes care of spot cleaning fabulously, I do not think that you should "get rid of your old mop and broom". Nothing replaces a real mop, and the vacuum and pad on a stick isn't going to do great with getting junk out of corners and such, or cobwebs off the ceiling. That being said, there is another Swiffer product that I'm about to try out, and that's the Swiffer Duster. They even have one on an extension stick for cleaning the ceiling fans and those darn cobwebs! I've used them before and I was pretty happy. I stopped using them because I went to the microfiber cloths, but we've already discussed that.

Swiffer Dusters

The bottom line of all this is this. While I agree that the level of clean that one will achieve with these products probably isn't equal to more old fashioned techniques such as real scrubbing, mopping, and dusting with polish and a soft cloth, it's better than nothing which is pretty much where I was before. I mean I cleaned up, but only like once a week instead of every day. In my opinion, knocking it down every day with a simple, easy tool is better than letting it pile up to make getting the big vacuum and mop out worth it. So there you have it, my shameless solution to cleaning. ~Kellie~