This weekend, in between lounging in the sun and watching about a million YouTube videos on how to build a wall (the jury is still out on if we will attempt to rebuild our garden wall ourselves), we managed to find some time to work on the spare bedroom.
In an ideal world, we would have finished the stripping, sanding and skimming by now, but we’re nowhere near done yet. The weather over the past few days here in the UK has been pretty amazing so we spent our time focusing on a few outdoors things like tidying up around the garden, getting rid of some of the weeds and, if we’re completely honest, mainly lying in the sun and having a well-deserved break.
Progress in the bedroom is fairly slow. After stripping most of the wallpaper (you can read about it here), stripping and sanding the skirting boards (more on that here) and priming our original Edwardian cornice (you can read more about that here), we’ve finally moved on to sorting the walls.
In general they’re in a fairly good condition, well they are if you don’t count the millions of little holes and cracks. We started by smoothing over the whole walls with a ready mixed skimming compound to level out any rough or uneven surfaces.
After skimming the walls, we went over everything with some fine grit sandpaper to make sure that the walls are completely smooth.
After a lot of sanding, we were able to prime the walls.
Our walls are all very dry and soak up any paint really quickly, so priming everything first works well for us and saves on the more expensive paint later.
To prime the walls we always just use some watered down standard white emulsion.
The difference between the existing wall and the wall we’ve already primed is pretty amazing. Having white walls makes the space so much lighter and brighter than before.
You can see that we still have to finish the back wall and around the window, but it’s slowly starting to take shape. We’ll hopefully finish this part of the makeover within the next few days and then we can finally start ripping up the laminate flooring! I can’t wait!
Have you been doing any DIY this weekend? Do you also have dodgy flooring that you can’t wait to remove?
Hi.
This is a great blog. I found you over the weekend while reading up on stair rework. From there I have moved on to this particular page about the skimcoat and priming of your walls, and would like a bit more detail on your primer. You mention that it is a watered down emulsion, but if you could be more specific, I would appreciate it. Our walls literally drink paint and so we use canned primer, and if your primer is acceptable and cheaper, I would go for that in a heartbeat!
Thanks for taking the time to write about your restoration efforts!
Jeff
St. Louis, MO, USA
Thanks for the compliment Jeff! Yes, we used watered down emulsion to prime the walls and there really isn’t much more to it. It’s just the standard white emulsion that we use to paint all walls and ceilings white mixed with some water (about 1 part paint to 4 parts water). When the emulsion and paint are mixed together it has the consistency of (and looks a bit like) milk. Because of the added water it dries slower when you paint the walls. On walls were really dry we sometimes applied two coats of our primer mixture.
We wrote another post about painting a different bedroom. In it you can see more photos and a bit more info on how we approach painting walls: https://www.littlehouseonthecorner.com/how-to-paint-new-plaster/
Hope that’s some help!
Cx
Thank you for replying. It does help, and I enjoyed the painting article you added. But do you create the emulsion or do you purchase it? That is what was confusing me. I guess because I am used to reading articles that mention brands. If this is a purchased product, I don’t need a brand name. I am unfamiliar with painting projects as I was much more involved in the teardown / rip-out phase, and my wife is better suited, tempermentally, for detail work like painting. Thanks again.
You’re welcome. The emulsion we use is just standard white paint. We always use Glidden contract matt in white (here in the UK the brand name has changed from Glidden to Armstead). Is cheap and good, but pretty much any white emulsion paint will do.
Cx