Trading Spaces

Rachel has cable TV at college and when she isn't studying diligently for a test, she has been known to sneak a look at those home remodeling shows. She came home with lots of ideas of how to redo one of our bedrooms in view to her moving back home after graduation in May. (That idea itself may be a topic for another blog, but not today.) Anyway, we pared her pile of ideas down to something a little more doable for a couple of amateurs without a professional designer and carpenter standing by: move the furniture out, clean, repaint (in two colors, neither of which was white!), move different furniture back in.

We started the project Thursday--a trip to buy paint and masking tape during lunch hour, then in the evening we cleared out the room (thanks go to a friend who helped move stuff--I hope your back is OK).

Friday and Saturday we worked long hours to repair, tape, retexture, paint, and repaint the walls, then tape and paint the trim. It all went reasonably well until we locked ourselves in the room and couldn't get out. I had taken the door knob off both sides of the door, but failed to take out the part that actually goes into the door frame (there must be a name for that piece, but I don't know what it is). When the door got pushed shut, we discovered we couldn't get it open again. "Not to worry," thought I, "I'll just use the screwdriver to open it." But when I started poking at it with the screw driver, I couldn't get it to turn. So I kept poking and whoops! a stray piece of the mechanism fell down into the inside of the hollow door. At that point Rachel said, "I'll crawl through the window and go get dad." So we pushed the screen out of the window (Lucky for us it is a low window) and she went and got dad (who was still asleep and leaving his girls to do all this man-work). Well, he came and grumbled at us, then we tried more screw drivers, and when that didn't work he crawled back in the window and took the hinges out--that didn't help either. Then he tore apart another door knob and latch from another door to see if that would help us figure it out, but they weren't identical. This all went on for an hour and finally I managed to jimmy the latch from the inside with a flexible putty knife--and since the hinges had been removed, the door came crashing down on my head when I finally got it open.

Anyway, our project is almost complete, and now we need to put the blinds back up and move furniture back in.

After