Demo and Skim Coating is a Pain!

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We had this room we called an “office”, but it was rarely used and mainly just stored a bunch of junk. So we made plans of turning it into a masculine man cave/bike shop/whiskey bar!

This is what it looked like when we first moved in.

At one point I decided to paint it a dark blue but then hated it with the builder yellow/beige ceilings. Tyler hung up some decor in here but overall it just looked like a mess. Do you have one of these rooms in your house?

We started by removing everything in the office and removing all the baseboards and old carpet with plans of adding vinyl wood flooring. I cut the carpet into smaller, more manageable sections with my razor knife so it would be easier to remove.

The carpet was removed and trashed along with the padding underneath and that left me with a concrete slab. Not everyone has a concrete slab like we do here in Texas, some people have a plywood type subfloor.

Once that was all gone, I had to remove the tack strip along the edges of the room that held the carpet down. That was a pain! I just used a hammer and it worked really well, some places I did have to use my mini crow bar.

For the walls I wanted to do Roman Clay which would mean I would need to skim coat the walls to cover up the orange peel texture we have. I could just put the Roman Clay directly on the texture but it would waste a lot of product and joint compound is a lot cheaper. This is what our texture looks like up close.

Michelle, my Instagram bestie from California flew to Texas to help me with this project and I was so thankful to have her here! This was a huge job and took about 5 hours to skim coat the office together (walls and ceiling)! This would have taken me a few days on my own!

Tyler was helpful too, he brought us more joint compound when we needed it, made us laugh and cooked for us! No complaints there, the man is an amazing cook!

For skim coating you just put joint compound on your drywall knife and smear it onto the wall. You scrape over it in different directions till it’s flat.

Here’s a quick video on the process with a VoiceOver explaining everything.

While we waited on that to dry, we took Michelle out to experience Texas since this was her first time here. We took her to our little hole in the wall bar we love so much for some karaoke and pool. We also ran into a roper there and he showed us how to rope! Don’t worry, of course we took her by Buc-ees and fed her Whataburger! Can you believe she still thinks In and Out is better?!?!

We work hard, but we party harder! Back to DIY the next day! We went over the walls with a light sanding and got VERY dusty! You want to make sure you’re wearing a mask for this one, you don’t want to breath that dust in!