Tuesday, October 21, 2008

storage room progress report

Tonight I worked on the storage room- one of our "bedrooms" that we are transforming from a storage room to a storage room. It does actually make sense though. Previously lots of things were stored in there over many months as I threw them on the floor; when we finish there will be shelves, boxes, and organization galore.

This room is in an awkward location in our house, so it is a natural for a storage room. It looked pretty bad though, and although I couldn't tell, it smelled pretty strongly of cat pee. After Sarah told me about it we decided to rip up the carpet (it's the only room in our house with carpet) and lay down some new carpet that was not infused with the stench created by years of cats missing the litter box. We were going to do this 2 weekends ago. So 2 weekends ago I ripped up the carpet with zeal, only to discover that it would take a lot longer than I first thought. I have been working on it ever since.

In the first place, as I was ripping the carpet up the smell nearly knocked me over. Gross! Once I had the carpet up I realized that I needed to clean the floor really well with TSP (and floors under carpets are DISGUSTING). That took an afternoon. Once I had clean floors I realized that it would be best if I painted the walls before I put the carpet down, and of course I had to repair the drywall before I painted the walls. I have been working on that for several days now.

Tonight I started painting, kind of. In an effort to keep the odor away, I sprayed some Kilz on the bottom of the walls and on the complete floor. I'm done for the night, so that is all the progress for now.

The Kilz was an oil-based spray primer labeled "odor-free" but the label was not even close to accurate. I kept the window and doors open, but I am still feeling not that great; it takes quite some time to spray paint a whole floor.

So, the process continues, but we are getting ever closer. Someday the room will be a storage/sewing/woodworking/TV room.

No comments: