Company's coming

There is nothing like the prospect of company arriving for a visit to focus you on finishing up things. With my son's wedding coming on August 20, my mom is flying in from Mississippi on August 17 and then driving with us to southeast Nebraska for the wedding.

The first weekend after we found out that my mom was coming for a visit, our day was brightened up by a cardinal in the blue spruce outside our bedroom window.

Although we have one guest bedroom complete, we want to finish up the larger of the two where we are putting a queen bed.

This is the room we're putting the queen headboard that we "adopted" from the abandoned furniture area at the apartment we used to live in. Robyn's vision for the headboard is a distressed look and I found some spray paint at Home Depot which matched the room colors.

After a light sanding, Robyn got down to business spraypainting the headboard.

To get the distressed look, I smeared the "high wear" areas with petroleum jelly.

Here's what the headboard looked like after a second coat...

We let the headboard dry for 24 hours, hit it with a light sanding again and then clear-coated it.

Robyn also continued with her thrift store finds which will be used to furnish this bedroom. Starting with an art deco style vanity chair...

An antique dining room chair....

And a coffee table with a marble composite top...

...along with a mirror and a small box which will be used for potpurri.

While I was patching...

...Robyn was pulling staples out the ceiling.

Then it was time to mop...

After a trip to Sherwin Williams for a gallon of gray primer, the transformation process began.

We were about a half gallon short in the stairway...

...but this gives you an idea about how grimey the walls were.

We also explored several options for the ceiling, considering a tin-look acoustic tile, paintable sheets of ceiling panels, pine siding. The paintable sheets were too expensive, the tin-look acoustic tile had to be special ordered, the lengths of pine siding didn't match the room dimesions closely enough.

We decided to go with beaded-board look panels. Here they are laid out in the yard getting a coat of primer.

Probably not one of my brighter ideas. Although it was easy to roll the primer on, they panels attracted insects and blades of grass. Robyn and I have to scrap that off before the final coats of paint.

We wrapped up our painting (Blackberry) on the bedroom last weekend and were able to get started on the flooring early Saturday morning. Two long, hard days later, it was in...