The First Room We Renovated

was our current bedroom. It’s the most used room, but yet – I haven’t put any photos of it on Instagram until now.

Our house has 4 bedrooms, including the basement room which we had turned into our home-gym. Even though our bedroom is not the biggest room in the house, we chose this room to be our bedroom because:

The basement room is the biggest, but it was also somewhat disconnected with the house. At first, the only way to enter that room is from exiting through the backyard door and entering through another one. Because it was awkwardly located, and no bathrooms nearby (yet), we didn’t even think about choosing it as our bedroom.
The biggest bedroom that’s actually within the house is our guest bedroom. That’s the only room that had popcorn ceiling, and not only that – it was a glittery popcorn ceiling. Honestly, when you turn on the lights – the room lit up like a disco ball. I mean, the previous owners must’ve known how to partayyyy. Since we needed a room to immediately put our bed into and sleep in, it didn’t make sense to put it in the room which we knew we were going to remove the popcorn ceiling. Also, this bedroom faces the front of the house, which is a bit noisier/less privacy.
The other bedroom is the smallest room in the house, which could barely fit a queen size bed comfortably. We knew we wanted to turn this room into P’s office.
That leaves us to this bedroom. It’s a decent size (10’10 x 10’9) and faces the backyard, but it had this awful 1950s wallpaper on one wall. And let me tell you, it’s the reason why I can’t look at wallpaper the same way anymore. I know wallpapers are a big trend right now, but I’m going to SAVE the future owner some pain if they want to remove it down the road. Because we can move the bed off that one wall, and still work on it – we decided to place our bed in here and that was that – it’s now our primary bedroom.

I didn’t have any social media when we first moved in this house, and although I wanted to document the process in details – I would just immediately get to renovating and would forget to take photos/videos! Fortunately, I do have some photos – I owe it all to P for them, as he is always the one to remind me to take photos/videos updates.

How our room was set up the first week. It’s nice to look back at these photos and remember where we started at.

A few things that needed to be done in the room was to remove the wallpaper, paint the room, and change the outlets/light switch.

Are you wondering why we didn’t paint over it instead? We had to remove the wallpaper and not just paint over it, because it was a textured wallpaper and the flowers on the wallpaper were thick and protruded out. So even painting over it, it would just look like an one color floral wallpaper. This was both our first time removing wallpaper, and I did not expect it to be that tough.

We bought the Zinsser wallpaper stripper and the Zinsser scoring tool. And to save you $$ and multiple trips to the hardware store, buy the Zinsser wallpaper stripper concentrate and a spray bottle. We probably used about 3 of the 32 oz of wall paper stripper before we bought the concentrate.

With these tools, in general – most of the wallpaper wasn’t too hard to remove.. the only part that was giving us troubles were the floral pattern areas as they were much thicker. We had to completely soak it with the stripper and waited longer than the recommended time. Recommended time was 2-5 minutes, and we waited ~15 minutes before trying to remove with a joint knife. We did that twice before the floral part came off.

After removing the wallpaper, P spackled some areas where the wallpaper teared out some of the drywall. He then smoothed down the wall by lightly sanding. After that, the room was ready to be painted!

We wanted to have one accent wall, and the rest of the walls white. For the accent wall, we went with Newburg Green by Benjamin Moore. For the rest of the walls, we chose Alabaster by Benjamin Moore.

This was my first time painting a room. I always thought it was an easy job, and you can just “wing” it. Since I’m going along the edges of the wall, I wouldn’t need to tape a line right? Let’s free-style it! Boy, was I completely wrong. Prepping the room and dialing down the technique are very important.
Funny thing is, P did warn me to use the painters tape… but classic KB – I wanted to just give it a try. And classic P – letting me learn the hard way.

Let’s just say – I went back and forth painting trying to “fix” the sloppy edges and got frustrated at myself.

And the blue accent wall is done! Now time to paint the rest of the walls a fresh new white!

**Fun Facts 1: P thought the room was already white and I shouldn’t have to paint it. I insisted on painting it because the “white” was leaning towards pink/tan color. Once I started painting the room white, he immediately commented on how the previous color was definitely not white.

**Fun Facts 2: It’s been a little over a year since we remodeled this room and I still have not painted the closet trim and door. Yes, I am part of the 95% club.