Creative Destruction: bedroom edition

For the last four weeks I have been hard at work on my younger daughter's room. We own a small home with two large bedrooms and one tiny bedroom with a super small closet. Since she is the younger girl, she is stuck with the smaller room. We looked around until she found a loft bed she fell in love with at Bob's Discount Furniture. Starting at the beginning of April we gutted her room, removing the lathe and plaster walls and sucking out the 1996 insulation. It was blown in when the house was finally resided after seventy years. We removed the closet, which was not wide enough to hold full size hangers anyhow, and expanded to the room to about 9' x 10'. While I had the walls open I replaced the single outlet with five outlets and fancy lighting. There are two lights: one overhead panda light and a blue art glass wall sconce by Hampton Bay (this shape, but this color). As with everything in her room, she selected the light fixture. The key feature of the bedroom's wiring is the dual three-way switches. As you enter the room there are two switches: one for the overhead light and one for the sconce. Then up, in a spot convenient to the loft bed, there is another pair of switches. If she climbs into bed forgetting to turn out the light there will be switches handy for her.

As a result, demolition, cleanup, hanging sheetrock, and mudding have been keeping me quite busy for the past three or so weeks. So busy I have been unable to keep up with my minor lodge paperwork. The mudding should be done in another five days or so, and then we can apply the magic primer. My wife found it while I was remodeling our library. I was never quite happy with the imperfections in the mudding job, so she bought a tinted primer which is essentially a super-thin joint compound mixed with paint. It did a great job masking the errors in the mudding. Even today people still do not realize I mudded the library, of course, what guest is going to say, "Man, that looks like sh*t. What monkey did the sheetrock?"

I look forward longingly to the complete bedroom and another year of rest until we tackle another project.

This post is brought to you by the music of Relient K. Their album "mmhmm" is great. If you are into a single track try Be My Escape [iTunes] or My Girls Ex-Boyfriend [iTunes].