Prepping for Paint

Our house is 10 years old, and it has seen the likes of 3 boys, 3 girls and a dog in addition to the plethora of birthday parties, moving furniture and anything else that can take out a wall and especially paint.

While the outside of the house could use some love, we decided to focus on the interior of the house since we have to look at it all the time. Ken was content saving up the money to pay for the paint and handling it ourselves. I detest painting. There is no other way to put it. It's not even that I'm really good at it, but I just don't like it. No! I suck at painting and I really hate doing it. Therefore, I worked part-time over the summer to put some extra money in our account in order to pay someone else to paint. 

After a lot of searching, we finally stumbled on a guy that a friend referred us to. Richard Moon - God bless this man!! We only wanted to paint our kitchen, dining room, living room and hallway. The bedrooms will wait until the girls leave home, but if it wasn't going to be too expensive, then we'd add the Guest Room/Ken's office to the mix. Richard came out for an estimate and was worried that $650 would be too much for us. Oh, seriously!! Holy Hallelujah!! So, we scheduled him for as soon as possible, which was within a week, and we spent the weekend prepping the house.

I am very happy to report that we don't need to be on an episode of Hoarders, but I could not believe the amount of Whatever was found under the sofa, behind the refrigerator, and God help us with the top of the kitchen cabinets. I have never claimed to be the best housekeeper, and apparently, you can tell when you move furniture around. 

So, in an effort to keep a running diary about our lives, I am still compelled to share the horror of our prep work despite my wanting to shout that we are not truly like this. Ha!

 Ken and I were discussing the status of our walls when we pulled down all the pictures

 After 10 years of "settling" there are cracks that need to be repaired. You have to love California with our earthquakes and funky weather.

 I was amazed at how the pictures had created an outline on the walls!

 The house was definitely looking empty with nothing on the walls

We worked on cleaning the walls, and Ken's son, Justin, came over to help move the larger and heavier furniture.

 OK, this was not as bad as we expected, but it's still gross. Note to self - Spring Cleaning needs to include the places where a ladder is required to get to it.

 All the dusting every week didn't help this poor alcove in the hallway.

 These were housed on top of the kitchen cabinets. Oh my!!

 Mandy and Taylor help scrub the walls

Oh, and then we saw what 6 kids can drop under the couch - the girls were apparently the worst:

Words cannot express my embarrassment and disgust at seeing what was underneath. Another note to self - move the furniture more and clean under it! 

Here is an example of one of the walls - I don't think anyone ever missed hitting these - there's nothing but chunks of wall and paint missing!

The garage held most of the items that we displaced:

However, anything that I was worried about being broken was placed in my office - I detest clutter and hate feeling crowded, so this is really bothering me:

We plan on eating out for the days the painter is here and we will barely be living in the house for the next couple of days. I'm really hoping that there is a vast improvement in the look of our poor house at the end of this.  Ken managed to get patches done on the walls from the kids missing going out the back patio and from jumping onto the sofa so we can have some uniform appearance again.