I Hate Doubts

I hate doubts. I'd much rather be completely gung-ho about something than have those niggling little thoughts that perhaps, but not necessarily, a mistake has been made. How is one to know for sure? I like for sure.

This deck has more oops-es than all the Home Depot paint departments in the whole world.

It is possible that this whole deal may have been a mistake. Or it may just be that the high adhesion primer fumes got to me and made me feel all hopeless-like.

For those of you who don't know much about manufactured homes, the walls are made of 3/8" drywall panels covered with a durable vinyl coating. Sort of like having all your walls covered in a tough, well applied vinyl wallpaper. The joints between the panels are covered with a narrow batten board that is covered in the same vinyl stuff, so it all matches. I guess this allows the sections to flex if needed when the buildings' parts are being moved. From that perspective, it makes a great deal of sense. However, if you ever cut it, tear it, drive a nail or a screw into, or otherwise mar the surface, you will never be able to fix it. It is visually unforgiving. And paint will not adhere well to it without additional work and cost.

Being the classy types that we are, we wanted something that looked less like a trailer and more like a regular house. HA. Joke's on us. In order to fully disguise the telltale characteristics of being trailer like, a laborious process is needed. We are now quite tired of said process , and are doing less and less to every room.

The yellow office was the first room we worked on, dubbed the "experimental" room. Little did we know that every room would have it own experiment as we tried to make things look good, tossing some techniques and adding others.

OK, it's really called  'pear' - no wonder it looks green

In this room, we removed all the battens that telegraph " I am a manufactured home!", and taped over the seams. It didn't come out as well as we'd like, but we're not pros. You get what you pay for. All in all, it looks OK, but we didn't want to do it again. This room' s order of rehab was:
1. Remove battens
2. Wash walls
3. Rinse walls
4. Rinse walls again
5. Wipe dripping brownish water off of walls with a large towel and pretend they don't need further rinsing
6. Prime walls with high adhesion primer. We chose Sherwin-Williams brand, and it does exactly what it says it will: make traditionally unpaintable surfaces paintable. It will also make you sick as a dog if there is not enough ventilation. One large open window with a fan blowing in at top speed and a door open as well  IS NOT ENOUGH.

7. Tape and patch walls and ceiling. (We primed first to make sure the drywall mud and texturing would stick to the surfaces.)
8. Roll thinned drywall mud on the walls with a standard 3/8" paint roller.
9. Paint popcorn ceiling blue.
10. Paint ceiling blue again.
11. Paint walls.
This took entirely too long and had too many steps. We regrouped and made a plan for the second bedroom.

It has to be better than the first, right? Well, right and not quite right.