It’s the first of January and Tommaso’s due date is right around the corner. It’s about time that I finished prepping his room. I spent the last few days trying to seal the doorway between his room and ours. The previous owner of our house tried to close off a doorway that connected our room to what we’re going to use for Tommaso’s room. They finished sealing the wall in our bedroom but didn’t finish the other side. They left it as a giant hole with exposed plaster board which looked ugly. They didn’t really use that room for anything other than storage for junk so I guess they didn’t really care about how it looked.

My friend Will helped a lot with the trowel work and sheetrock compound to fill in most of the hole. My dad then did a second coat a few days later. I’m not exactly handy, so I tried to get help from anyone who knows more than I do, which is just about everyone. My job though, is to finish it up and paint. After some trial and error I figured out how to use some of the left over sheetrock compound, spackling compound, and a putty knife to get it smooth. My walls are plaster and lathe, so it took a little experimenting to get everything to blend in right. It actually looks pretty good. It looks a lot better than the job the painters did we hired a few month ago. Their patch didn’t hold and I had to tear it all down and start over. It wasn’t a total loss though. Their other patches held and the primer they shot on the walls really cleaned up the room.

At least one thing I’ve learned from this, is that I’m never going to use painter’s tape again to cut-in on our walls. The walls in my house aren’t exactly smooth or straight, (plaster and lathe) so it’s hard to get clean lines. The lines from the painter’s tape in our living room are horrendous. I’ve found I have a pretty steady left and right hand and can get a nice clean line using a 2” angle brush. It’s actually faster too since I don’t have to move around the room two additional times to put the tape up and tear it down.

The first coat of paint is almost done. I need to finish the last wall and to do that I need to move everything over to the other side of the room. The room is pretty small so I can’t just put everything in the middle of the room and I don’t want to put everything in the kitchen again. The crib and dresser are also too heavy to move far by myself. We were getting tired of living out of boxes so we unpacked all the baby stuff even though his room isn’t done. I should be done with the first coat tomorrow morning and at least half way through the second tomorrow. My mom may come to visit on Sunday and help finish decorating if she doesn’t go to Lake Tahoe with my dad. My sister raided the local Pottery Barn Kids and bought all the Peter Rabbit stuff she could find. It was a very nice present.

It’s almost done and it should look good when I’m finished.