Preparation For Painting

The tenants who lived in our house before we got it back didn’t treat the house with much love…at all.  They left broken light bulbs all over the floor and a hole punched through a door plus nails, screws and push pins in every wall.  

We had a lot of prep work to do to remove the bajillion screws and nails, fill holes, patch places in the walls and rip things off the walls before we painted.  The walls are textured plaster which is challenging, but also forgiving especially when there are so many imperfections in the walls.

Removing Screw #10,000,001 {ha!}

Who in their right mind hangs an air freshener above their living room window?  Yeah, that’s what I thought.  No one.  Snort.

And look at at the stained ceiling! Yikes!

The living room, kitchen and breakfast area had disgusting ceilings.

Holes…SO many holes!  I pulled at least 30 push pins out of the wall.

Apparently when I painted the living room when we lived here before I left the outlet covers on.  How dumb!  Always remove the outlet covers!

Random tape in the wall. Very strange.

I filled the holes and imperfection in the walls with Red Devil One Time Spackling.

Ripping off the stunningly beautiful {sarcasm} 70s gold laminate back splash!  I can’t tell you how how excited I was to say “goodbye” to that!

I took the upper cabinet doors off.  Let’s just say that these screws were practically glued in with a huge layer of grease.

Delightful.

We pulled out the baseboards and I’m so glad we did because we found some mold.  Icky.

More on that later!

Breakfast Room with baseboards removed.

Once we got everything prepared we were finally ready to paint!

Yay!  My favorite part!