So I’ve been spending some time trying to get the dressing room into some kind of habitable state recently.  In fact, I had a week’s holiday and instead of making like a normal person and booking off for some warm sunny climate, I decided that I would tackle this room.  And let me tell you, it took all week.  And then some.

From far, the room wasn’t really terrible but look closer and you will have seen some pretty ugly anaglypta wallpaper (thick white spongy stuff that really has no business being on walls at all) and a lot of ‘yeah this’ll do for the time being’ design.  All in, for a room that I started and ended every single day in, it came to the point where it was simply no longer acceptable.

And so, the weekend prior to my week off, I started the rather harrowing task of removing the wallpaper, only to find (even worse than anaglypta wallpaper), woodchip wallpaper hiding underneath.  Once all the anaglypta was removed and the woodchip wall paper was scraped off, there was big cracked plaster horrors beneath that.  Oh yeah, there was a whole lotta ugly going on in this room.  And it only got worse.  Much worse.

Now you will be very happy to know that at this point, I am pretty happy with the state the room is finally in although there a few absolutely definite things that I need in order for me to stamp it “swoon worthy”.  We’re not quite to that stage.  But, in the interests of sharing, I thought I would share with you the horrors of DIY just in case you were considering tackling a similar project in the future.

We’ll start with a sneaky peak of it’s current condition just to ease you into it.  And then we’ll pretty much free fall into ohmygodseriouslywhatwereyouthinking territory.

Ahhh that’s nice no?  A lovely plaster bust courtesy of Rockette St George that I didn’t have to spend a dime on as I was one of the winners in a recent Facebook competition they ran.  For realz, people, I was so stoked.  Her name is Emily and she’s so purty she makes me happy all lookin’ out for my bangles.

Now for the messy bits.  Last you saw, my room was looking a bit like a Castle Gibson set, all moody and scraped up and romantic but despite a few comments of ‘it actually looks kinda cool’, trust me, living with it in that state wasn’t.  Plaster falling out of the wall as you are getting ready in the morning is so not the look I was going for.  Bear in mind as well, this picture shows (mostly) only the first layer removed.

You can see in the corner where I needed to get to.  Right back to the original plaster.

I have to apologise as the mess and dust was such that I daren’t bring my good camera in the room whilst all the work was going on so all I have is phone pictures.  Behold the loveliness of the following week… a fully scraped wall with decades of patches and paint finishes.

The pic above showcases just how fun it was scraping all that woodchip off.  Let me tell you, sweaty sticky wood chip goes EVERYWHERE.  The floor was a horrific mess after this exercise which took me 2 full days of steaming, scraping, steaming, scraping and cursing.

The next step was addressing the rather huge holes in the internal wall which I showed you a taste of here:

Well, there were more on that wall.  And they were bigger and ran almost the full length of the wall.  So I figured, in for a penny, in for a pound and decided to knock all the plaster off the wall.  Here’s what it looked like half way through the job.

See all that sexy rubble on the floor?  Filled 5 heavy weight bags full of the stuff.  That was fun.  So was the dust.   What I don’t have pictures of is when it came time to nail plasterboard to the wall, we decided to remove the wood slats as well (yay! more mess!) and just nailed the plaster board directly to the main wood beams.  It did the job as you’ll see below.

We also patched the fine cracks and smaller holes in the plaster on the other walls…

…and then W plastered the whole wall.  He’s getting pretty good at the whole plastering malarky, having only first tried it in the kitchen remodel last year and got a bit more experience whilst he’s been making over the man cave.  He does a damn good job I have to say.

Well that’s better.

Once all the plaster was dry, we covered all the walls in lining paper in preparation for the wallpaper that I’ll be getting once my bank balance recovers.  We did the 3 other walls first by the Sunday afternoon of my week off and then this weekend, finally finished papering the final wall (you can see I’d already moved most everything in by that point as I just couldn’t wait to get my room back!).

Other work included sanding, priming and painting the skirting boards, door trim and picture rail and painting the walls above the picture rail a bright white.  Unfortunately, above the picture rail was also woodchip wallpaper but to be honest with you, by that point, I decided it wasn’t that noticable (it’s pretty high above your head) and I really really didn’t want to scrape more woodchip than I absolutely had to.  So I gave it all a fresh coat of white paint along with the cornising and called it done. You may call it laziness, I call it efficiency.  Potato, Potatto.

I’m SOOOO looking forward to getting the wallpapering done in this room because I know it will completely tranform the space.  In the meantime, I’m really happy that I’m now getting ready every morning in a nice, clean space.  Plus, I finally got my Billy Bookcases to store my shoes and lots of other things which I’ve been wanting now for nearly two years!

If you come back to the blog later this week, I’ll be sharing the semi-finished project and what else is still to come so stay tuned for that.  In the meantime, have you tackled any projects that seemed a good idea to start and then morphed into a huge messy project?  G’wan and share in the comments…