Every home improvement project has this phase called the messy middle where too many things are in progress and unfinished. This is our current phase of our Mid-Century Sunroom Project.
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The One Room Challenge™ is usually a six week challenge, but this year they extended the time for the project completion to 8 weeks. I am very thankful to have the two extra weeks to work on my part of our mid-century sunroom.
Last week I shared a post for our mid-century sunroom project for the final construction phase after sharing the week before the demo day and rebuild progress. The walls of the room are built and the air conditioner unit installed. This was all completed the first week of May.
Since that time we have started working on our part of the room projects including some furniture makeovers.
The existing ceiling and walls were given a thorough cleaning with a pressure washer and soap. During the construction phase, the room quickly filled with yellow pollen and sawdust. So it needed a good cleaning.
This room always filled up with a thick layer of yellow pollen every Spring that was hard to sweep up and caused lots of sneezing and coughing in the process. I recently saw the wonderfully sweet gentleman who built our home at Walmart one morning and he said they never did use the screen porch room because of the pollen.
Hopefully the new walls will prevent this from happening next Spring or at least be more manageable.
After cleaning the room, we started the painting process.
Since my husband is so much taller than I am, he took over the task of priming and painting over the original brown colored ceiling – which matches the outdoor trim – to the grey exterior wall color.
Two of the walls of this sunroom are the original exterior walls so we also gave those two walls fresh coats of paint in the original exterior house color. A very light grey color that I have no idea what the name of it is because we had to have it color matched to the original color.
The dark brown ceiling made up of sheets of plywood just made the room feel very dark and heavy. Painting the ceiling the same color as the two exterior walls just made sense and really brightened up the room. We are still discussing the possibility of adding some decorative trim pieces to the ceiling to hide the seams of the plywood, but not sure if it will get done during the One Room Challenge™ or not.
We are also considering a much darker grey for the exterior of our home or a blue/greyish color but that will be a project for next Summer.
During the same time he was painting the ceiling and I was painting the two walls in this room, I also started some furniture makeover projects.
Outside of the room on the deck, I have been sanding off the old finish on two vintage furniture finds for the room.
On both of these pieces, the old finish was damaged and thick from age. I could have easily just painted over the old finishes with chalk paint or milk paint.
That is not the look I want.
One of the details of mid-century design is the awesome wood tones of the wood furniture pieces. For this reason, and because I think the natural maple wood of these two pieces will look fantastic in the room, I decided to completely strip off the old finish and sand down to the raw wood.
I started by using a spray finish remover…and scraping off the top layer of varnish. After that I used a combination of a hand held sander and hand sanding to remove the next few layers.
As you can see, both pieces still need a lot more work.
Of course, one of the projects on my to-do list for this weekend is to re-stain the side table and the bar cart in new colors. I will also try to repair the leather on two Wassily chairs that you have seen before in my home. The reason why and hopefully a good outcome to showcase is for another post.
Next week I hope to be pushing this project even closer to the finish line.
Hugs,
Matthew 6:14 “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.”
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