Weekend Warriors Part I

This past weekend Mike & I decided to attack our storage room & start making it into the game room we have been talking about for the past 3 years. What? you say. Kim is actually going to get something accomplished? Yes I did. Well, not completely. But at least we got started.

The saga began on Saturday morning, we got up early at 8am (yes, this is early for us on the weekend) & started unloading the room.

This is the before photo of the room. See how much stuff we had piled up in there.

We took everything out to the back yard & sorted everything into 3 piles. A keep pile, a sell pile & a trash pile. Luckily the sell pile is the biggest. I was pretty proud of myself, I put alot of MY items in the sell pile. Anyone who knows me very well knows that this can be considered a miraculus event. The hardest thing for me to part with is my doll collection. I may end up keeping one or two of the dolls but for now, they are all in the sell pile.

I kept trying to put Mike's items in the sell pile but he is more attached to his items than I am to mine (hard to believe). He kept saying that his son Brandan might want it (I highly doubt it) or he wanted to keep it for himself (this is more likely the truthful answer). Even if we had no use for the stuff. I told him I didn't want to hear anymore complaints about my stuff. He was worse than me with parting with his stuff. I guess God wasn't in the mood to grant 2 miracles in the same day.


After sorting, we (I mean Mike) then pulled out the nasty teal blue carpeting. Seriously, who puts such a ugly color of carpet in their house? Every room in our house has this carpet. Can't believe we are starting to get rid of the hideous carpet (can you tell I don't like it?). Here is Mike pulling out the tack strip & the nails.

Next was removing the ugly wall paper border (can you imagine this border with teal blue carpet?). When we bought our house, almost every room had some sort of ugly border, but Mike took it all down except for this room. He liked the sun, moon & star border. I on the other hand have always hated it. Finally, it too must go bye bye.

This process took amost 3 hours as this particular border did not want to cooperate in the removal process. It was quite stubborn. We tried using wall paper remover, but that didn't work too well. What finally ended up working was good old TSP (trisodium phospate). I had to go to the store to track some down. Nowadays you can't find any TSP with phospate in it. They all say "phosphate free" (at least in California). But I guess it is not the phosphate that makes the glue come off the wall cause it worked.

Mike then had to put molding around the french doors & textured the wall around the doors. He put in the french doors earlier in the year, but had never put up the molding around the door, or textured the wall around the door. I forgot to take a pic of this.

By the time he got done it was about 8pm. We decided to call it a night as Mike still needed to cook steaks for dinner (see why I married him?).


We got up Sunday morning early (8am) and started on the room again. I know, it was the sabbath, but I am the black sheep in the family & our ox was in the mire. Even though we had pushed it in the mire. Today was painting & putting in the floor. Here is Mike painting the walls. This is the first room in our house that will have color on the walls. I told Mike that I will now be wanting every wall in our house painted. He wasn't too thrilled as he hates painting. We painted the walls "Vulcan Grey". I did paint some of the trim.

Grey? Why grey? Well we are doing a coca cola game room & I found a room online that was done in the similar style & it had grey walls. I liked how it looked with the coke red & green accents.


Here is Mike putting in the black & white checkerboard peel & stick tiles. Jesse called them lick & stick tiles. Good thing they weren't actually lick & stick. It would have taken us a year to put them in. My job was handing Mike the tiles & throwing the paper backing in the trash can. See, I helped in the room.

Ta da!!!! The room is almost complete. All we need to do now is add shelves & bring in the game room stuff. We won't be able to do that until next weekend. I will post next week when the project is finally complete.

We also are having a yard sale this Saturday to sell the stuff in the sell pile. What ever doesn't sell, gets sent to the thrift store. Hopefully! Who wants to take bets?

Kim