THE RULES:

1. I have to use the existing furniture. (too expensive to buy new) And I can't paint the furniture, as it won't adhere to the surface.

2. I have to use the existing layout of the room. (there is a long explaination for this, but just know that I couldn't change it, even though I desperately wanted to)

3. I can pick any color/design and change the walls as I like. I can also change the curtains for the window.

Hmmm... this is gonna be tough : ) but we shall survive...

THE LIMITATIONS:

1. The walls: The walls are made of hard slabs of concrete and had more bumps and nicks and holes and portrusions than the rocky mountains.

Solutions/Options:
Since I couldn't paint directly on the walls, I had one of two options: Wallpaper the walls, or wallpaper the walls and then paint over the wallpaper.
I chose the later as I couldn't find a wallpaper that suited my taste. The choices here were VERY limited and the cool wallpapers were big money.

2. Paint/Wallpaper: Here you do not go into a store, look at a vast aray of a gadzillion colors and go, "Oh, I love that shade of pink." No, here you buy white paint, then you buy a little bottle of color and add it to your paint. There are about two shades of each color, and how much you add to the white paint is how dark your paint becomes.

Solutions/Options:
We finally found a place that sold paint and you could choose the color, although they didn't have a ton to choose from, it was MUCH more than anywhere else. So we opted to buy the smallest amount available (2.5 liters) as it was pretty spendy, and then we decided we would bleed down the darker color to a softer version for the majority of the room.

3. Fabric: I wanted to replace the fabric on the headboard for the bed because as you can see it kind of sets a tone and style for the room. I looked everywhere in Minsk for a good fabric that would match (I tried to do this first so I could match paint to the fabric), but I came up very empty-handed.

Solutions/Options:
Buy fabric in the states. I decided to buy both the fabric for the bed and corresponding fabric for the curtains in the states, or even in Germany. But that part won't be done until after Christmas when I go to both those places anyway.

Okay, this is gonna be really tough. My first home remodeling project and I get a zinger!

THE Plan:

For the color, I decided on purple. Not purple, purple, but a deep almost grey purple that would still go with the furniture and yet add more depth and cooler feel to the warm, somewhat bland furniture.

In order to make the room look taller, and also more modern, (as the overall feel of the room was too Victorian for me, esp the furniture) I decide to do stripes on one of the walls and use it as a focal point. Think barcode.

Steps:

Step 1. Putty

I had to putty the walls, filling in all the horrible little cracks. Not all of course because I was going to put wallpaper over them.

Here's a picture of how bad the walls were/are:

Uhm, yea.

See how much I had to putty? Honestly it needed it EVERYWHERE. But that wasn't gonna happen, so I settled on the big holes hoping against hope the wallpaper and paint would cover the rest. (Of course excluding the crooked part of the wall)

Step 2. Sand

When I say sand, I mean sand. No this is not an alien, nor did Ales age 50 years, he's just super-duper dusty!

Did I mention we went through this putty/sand stage three times. No fun, the whole apartment was covered in a thin layer of dust for weeks.
 

Step 3. Clean (this step was repeated throughout the different steps and was my least favorite part : )

Step 4. Wallpaper

We chose two kinds of wallpaper. For all the walls excepting my soon to be barcode purple wall we used a subtle weave pattern that would be even more subtle when we painted over it. I really only wanted smooth walls, but that would defeat the purpose of the pattern covering up the millions of problems in the walls.

They sell wallpaper here specifically designed for painting on called "vliselin", and the roll we bought was about twice the width of a normal roll, so while it made it easier in some ways, it also made it harder to line it up correctly.

For the stripe wall we used a different wallpaper because it would have been a little hard to paint stripes on a woven texture. And the second wallpaper had lines imprinted in it, which would help me when painting and add to the overall effect.

So here's pictures of the room after wallpaper:

Wall 3 &4. Yes, there is a cream colored wallpaper and a white tone. Your eyes aren't playing tricks on you.

So now that you know what we are up against, let's tackle the PAINT. Well, let's actually wait until the next blog post....

See you then!

Love,
Emily