A Squirrel’s Room*: Part 1

We have LESS THAN FOUR THREE MONTHS until the arrival of our (we’re 95% sure) daughter. This might sound like plenty of time to get things ready, but it’s taken us until now to take the baby’s room from Man Cave/Pitch-It-In Room:

to Nursery in Progress:

Obviously, we need to pick up the pace a little.

Our house’s former owners left it in pretty good shape, but they did do some “maintenance” that was obviously intended to cover up problems rather than solve them, and thereby made more work for us than there would have been if they’d just left things how they were to begin with. One such hack job is the touch-up paint they slapped on the baseboards and trim in several of the rooms. Not only was the color ever-so-slightly mismatched from the underlying hue, but it was bubbling and peeling and generally driving me insane whenever I looked at it.

Look! Isn’t it HORRIBLE?

Trust me, it looked much worse in person than mere photos can convey.

We’ve left it this way in most of the house, since we were trying to paint almost all the rooms before moving in and didn’t have a whole lot of time to fix the nitty-gritty. But as we started getting ready to paint the nursery, my detail-oriented little brain kept piping up “If you’re going to do something, do it right!” Also, I was having visions of the baby creeping around rubbing strips of pigment off the baseboards and eating them, and I KNOW it’s not lead-based, but that shit cannot be good for a nine-month-old. So: sanding and painting baseboards! Yay!

Since it’s an irregular surface, at first I thought I’d have to hand-sand my way around the room. Then I tried it for twenty minutes and decided, “Fuck that noise,” and got out my trusty Mouse sander, which has deh-heh-HEH-finitely been well worth forty bucks. Even more so after this project.

A few hours later, the baseboards looked like this:

Much better! Not nearly so peeling-paint-y.

So how do you paint baseboards (after wiping off the sanding dust with a damp cloth, of course) without getting the carpets all messy, you ask? Very carefully. Actually, if you’re a lazy redecorator like me, not that carefully: you just get a longish, narrowish piece of cardboard to hold between the bottom of the baseboard and the carpet as you move around the room, like so:

Make sure you paint several thin coats (rather than one or two thick ones) so drips won’t be an issue. I did three coats, with 30-60 minutes of drying time between each. A fourth coat wouldn’t have hurt, but I was very ready to stop painting. These days when my body tells me it’s ready to stop doing something, I stop.

The much-improved result:

Next up: Ceiling! And walls! We’ve done this before.

* When we were starting to announce the pregnancy to friends, Sean joked to them that either I was pregnant, or I’d swallowed a squirrel and it was moving around inside of me.