It All Started With a Coat

Last week Bob asked me if I knew where his flannel jacket was. I told him I'd unpack it that day since it was packed with all of the other winter coats. This meant washing them all and hanging them up since I wasn't opening the vacuum bag for just one coat.

As I was washing the coats I noticed that one of the coat racks on the wall was coming off. No way would it hold a bunch of coats. We had already had another one fall out.

I told Bob that he would have to figure out something for the coat racks so I could hang our coats. The next morning while I was sleeping in, I heard him get the screw gun out to remove the coat racks from the wall. The plan was to put a piece of wood on the wall that was screwed securely to the studs in the wall and then attach the three coat racks we had to the piece of wood.

A few minutes after I heard him remove the coat racks from the wall I hear, "riiiiippp, crack, riippp, craaack..." What in the world?? I finally realized that sleeping in wasn't going to happen and went out into the living room to see what he was up to because it didn't sound good.

He was tearing the seam strips off the wall. We own a double-wide mobile home. It's a newer home, but we didn't pay to have the upgraded sheet rock walls. So, at each seam instead of seam taping and plastering the walls, they just put a small strip of wood that matches the wall to the seam. I've looked at them for over 7 years and I absolutely hate them.

Our conversation went something like this:

Me: What are you doing?

Bob: Tearing these ugly strips off the wall. We'll just seam tape it.

Me: I agree that the strips have to go, but you do realize that we can't do just one wall, right?

Bob: Yeah, I figured.

Me: You also realize that this means repainting the whole room, right? I don't have enough paint left over from the last time we painted to repaint the wall let alone the whole room.

Bob: (he shrugs) Yeah, I know.

Me: If we do one room, we might as well do them all. One at a time of course.



I think that's when he realized that he opened a whole new can of worms.

The only room in the house that has been fully painted in the 7 years we've lived here was the living room. I ordered plain cream colored walls, knowing that I would want to paint each room eventually. I wanted a neutral background to work with. We painted part of Boo's room but never went back in to finish the job. Since then she's decided she wants a new color anyway...

So, we bought paint over the weekend for the living room and I think the paint is a little too dark to do the whole room. I've decided that since I need more paint anyway I'd use a lighter color on three of the walls. We painted one wall with the dark gray and put up the coat rack. I'm very pleased with the results, but I also know that there is so much more to do.

As you can see, I have trim to paint. The bottom trim was already white from when we put in the laminate floor, but the top trim has been ignored up until this point. No longer. I cannot leave it the wood, it has to go white in my opinion.

This also proves that you can seam tape wallboard and paint over it. My wallboard is slightly textured, so if you look close enough you can see where the seams are. However, with the paint color I chose it's hard to see the seams unless you're looking for them and/or knew where they were to begin with.

The wall had four seams: two of them we used the traditional method of plaster and tape, but the other two we just used plaster. I think the ones with just plaster lay flatter. Bob pointed out that sheet rock is made to be seam taped and wallboard is not. Anyhow, despite the fact that the walls are not as seamless or flat as traditional sheet rock walls, it looks 100 times better than it did with the wooden strips.

We need to go to the store and buy one more rack. Each rack runs about $10 at Lowe's. We've obviously bought three over the years. We decided to make the board long enough to accommodate four racks. Each of us will have his/her own place to hang their coats. With 12 hooks per rack, if you can't hang all of your coats on it then you have too many coats.

Eventually, I will put pictures of the kids up on that wall; all of them framed with white. That's a whole other post since I won't be using traditional picture frames :)