Master Bedroom

Sorry it has taken me so long to post but we have had a whirlwind of things happening in our household, a change in jobs, marching band competitions, new musical instruments, trying to train new dogs, making room for a foreign exchange student....Whew!  It feels like October has just flown by.

After finishing the bathrooms we decided to move on to the master bedroom.  This is a room which originally was smaller but we knocked down a wall to get rid of a walk-in closet.  You can see the post where we took down the wall back in April by clicking here.  Once we removed the wall we had a pretty good deal of sheetrock patching to do.  Also, the door that will lead to the master bath was previously a closet door and therefore too small. So we widened the doorway.  We also incorporated some leftover deadspace behind the new bathroom to become a second closet to service the master.  So a lot of our time lately has been doing boring stuff like hanging drywall, taping and floating, texturing, and painting.  There's not much to see as evidenced in this photo of the new closet.

I would say that the big impact thing we have been working on has been ceiling paneling.  After much debate about how to repair the ceiling where the room and closet came together, we finally just decided it would be easier better to cover it up.  We could have hung new drywall and patched but the existing ceiling already had some sag in it because the rafters are 24 inches apart.  So what to cover it with?  I looked for a reasonably priced ceiling plank that was already primed white but couldn't find anything.  What we ended up with was a raw pine plank from Lowes.  These planks are a few inches wide and 8 feet long.  They are only about 1/4 thick so they are super lightweight.  Hopefully they are rigid enough to hold their shape but light enough not to sag.  Only time will tell. 

These are tongue and grove pieces across a 13 foot span so we set up our scaffold set and another ladder and started working.  I was worried that it would be hard to get the long pieces aligned but it has turned out easier than I thought.  Since the boards are thin they are pretty flexible.  Also, when things are fitting together right we just scrape off the back part of the groove in the problem spot. 

We are using a finishing nail gun to attach the planks.  Some people said to use liquid nails or caulk but that seemed like way to much trouble. 






It wasn't long before we got into a rhythm.  The room is about 20 feet long and we did probably 1/4 of it in 4 hours.  The next time we were out we moved a little faster since we were familiar with the process and we finished another 40%.  So we still have a little more than 1/4 to do.  Here are some pictures of our progress.

I had read on discussion forums that you see a lot of mistakes right at first but as you add more planks, they start to disappear.  I definitely agree with that.  Your eye is not drawn to the mistakes when there is a bigger expanse of ceiling.





Here we had to cut the wood around an air conditioning vent.  Just to be on the safe side I coated all the edges of the wood with duct tape (the real kind) to make sure the wood did not soak up any condensation.




One thing I wished I had done was to paint the walls all the way to the ceiling before we started.  I have since gone back and painted close to the ceiling.  I plan to put a piece of trim around the edge anyway so the paint doesn't have to be perfect.



Since the wood is raw, I plan to do something to finish it.  We considered doing that before we put it up but decided against it.  I am hoping to use a sprayer since our room is empty - I will just have to hang plastic over the walls.  Originally I planned to paint it white.  But, as usual, I am starting to love the wood look.  Boy am I a sucker for wood grain.  I have a hard time covering it up!  So then I started to think that a whitewash could be nice.  The room is a teal color (not sure why it shows like a bright cornflower blue on the computer).  The drapes are charcoal with a white geometric pattern them.  So then I thought maybe I would try a gray tinted whitewash.  I went to the hardware store and the paint guy convinced me to get an oil-based wipe-on stain by Minwax in their new color Common Gray.  I am so lazy with cleanup, that I generally avoid any oil-based product.  But I took this one home and tried it out on some scraps.  It is interesting but I think it makes this wood too dark for a ceiling.  I went to another store and saw that Rustoleum has a stain line with a transparent gray called Driftwood.  And it is water-based, hooray!   I took to home and tried it, but it might be too light.  I feel a little like Goldilocks!  Anyway here is a shot of the test stains with the single board raw, the top group Driftwood, and the bottom group Common Gray:

I may have to go back and get a darker gray Rustoleum.  My plan to apply this stain is to tape up plastic to cover the walls and then spray the stain using a hand pump sprayer.  After letting it sit for a few minutes I will wipe it with some type of cloth.  I would like to try putting the cloth on a pole for ease but I am not sure that will work.  What I have found with stain is that the import part is that you make one long continuous wipe for each board.  This could be a pain and maybe not worth it. 

Hopefully we will finish with this ceiling.  Once we complete that, I have a lot of flooring to lay.  My knees hurt just thinking about it!