Nursery progress

Since I knew that the chair rail wasn't going to stay (see my previous post about starting this project), I got the gumption to tear it down during nap time the other day.  I had my husband help me remove much of the contents of the room a few days ago, knowing I wouldn't be able to do anything with so much stuff in the way.  Right now, there is just a small bookshelf, the pack-n-play and a small dresser.  Not much--but still a lot for the size of the room.  It's such a small room that taking the chair rail down didn't take very long, but annoyingly, the atrocious paint job was done after the chair rail was installed and therefore it stuck and ripped off in chunks.  It looked lovely.

I knew from tearing down the chair rail in our kitchen, that the area where the chair rail was would be visible despite painting over it if I didn't even it out or patch it somehow.  The blue paint was thick, so it would definitely leave a line, and the white part (that was under the chair rail) didn't have as much texture as the rest of the wall.  In the kitchen, we had just used drywall spackle and evened it out as much as possible and then used a long-nap roller to paint over it.  But it's still obvious there was something there when the light hits it.  I wanted to try to avoid that if I could in this room.

First, I tried using spackle, but just doing it along the paint line and putting it down roughly.  This is what it looked like before painting:

I thought it would work.  But it didn't.  After putting two coats of color-kill primer on the walls, it was still ridiculously obvious that there had been a chair rail at that spot on the wall.  I didn't take after pictures, I'm sorry.  I was in a groove and wanted to get the thing done. 

Eventually, I ended up buying a spray-paint-sized can of orange-peel texture.  I followed the directions on the can and sprayed the wall generously.  It still didn't make the imperfection disappear, but it's a LOT better.

Here's the end product (and a sneak peak of the wall color!).

Next up:  the project I thought would take 8 hours that ended up taking four weeks (but was TOTALLY worth it because it made this room perfect).