For anyone that doesn’t know, I was married to a carpenter. A very talented carpenter. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t build or create, and I admired his abilities so much that I took advantage of it and there was plenty of his handiwork around our house. He loved teaching and praise while he worked, which meant that I was required to be present, encouraging, and helpful through every project he did. It was exhausting at the time, but I found out that I learned a lot from him!

Fast forward to post divorce, and I wanted projects done but without the anger. It was time to see how much I learned! The first project I tackled was renovating a room in my mom’s house to be my new at-home office. The room of my choice had plenty of damage to it. There was old foam lining the walls and ceiling and the first step was to peel off all the foam and residual glue from the walls. It was tedious, but I eventually ended up with mostly clear walls as shown below.

I did the best I could, but the walls were far from smooth. The best decision would’ve been to tear down the damaged drywall, and re-drywall the room, but that was way more work than I wanted to do, so I started with the hardest part to get it out of the way…the ceiling. I’m going to be honest, I almost gave up at this point. I called a contractor to get a quote, and he never called me back after seeing the disaster I was working with, so I had no other option but to get to work. I chose to cover the ceiling with wood paneling. I know, I know, wood paneling? So 70’s, but I had a vision! Now how do you get it to stay up there? I did solicit some advice for that part and a glue/nail gun combo sounded like it should do the trick.

Oh, I also had to cut angles to get the pieces to fit and I highly don’t recommend working with angles on your first project. The first few cuts were ROUGH and they maybe didn’t line up exactly how they were supposed to, but just don’t look at that part! Regardless of a few bad cuts, I loved how it was turning out!

When I removed the foam from the ceiling, I also took down the main light that ran across the room. Putting it back up didn’t seem feasible with the way it was mounted so I came up with the idea of running strip lighting along the middle square in the room. The only problem was that strip lights are AC and they need the plug-in adapter to convert it to the house’s DC circuit. I looked into wiring an AC/DC adapter in the ceiling and it was going to be more expensive than what I was looking for so I chose to wire an outlet into the old light fixture and just plug em in! Yeah, don’t do that. It worked great for awhile. But then this thing called gravity started doing what it does best and the plug slowly started dropping from my ceiling outlet. It eventually dropped just enough to arc and I almost burned the house down. Learn from my mistakes, don’t do that! But it was pretty!

Now for the walls, they still weren’t smooth and I can’t wood panel the entire room! I chose to cover the damage with a thick, textured wallpaper and it worked like a charm. There were still some areas the showed through, but considering how bad it was, and I didn’t spend an arm and a leg on a contractor, I’d say the problem was solved! It was time to decorate and move in!