What We Learned - Movie Room Mistakes
Whether a project is big or small, there’s always a very good chance you’ll learn something new. Like any full room makeover, we certainly learned a lot - good, bad and ugly - we want to share with you. Whether you’re taking on this exact project, something similar or just want to be able to learn from someone else’s mistakes, we hope you find this helpful!
Painting on textured walls - When you’re in a new home, you definitely forget the little things that in retrospect seem so incredibly obvious. Looking back, we wish we would have taken our textured-ish walls into consideration when taping off to get crisp lines. Given how un-flat our walls really were, there was terrible amounts of bleed under the tape. If this is something you too are dealing with, we would recommend considering wallpaper or contact paper to achieve similar results. If you can go for a more permanent fix, there are various DIY or for-hire jobs to smooth out walls texturing.
Using a stencil on textured walls - Similar to what we found out on the general painting of the walls and issues with the painters tape, the stencil had similar bleed issues due to the walls texture. The stencil itself was wonderful and we are thrilled with how easy it was to use. Again, we would recommend potentially opting for wallpaper or peel and stick if possible.
When a couch gets broken(ish) - Unfortunately on our move, a portion of our previous couch totally pooped out under the weight of moving boxes. Because of this, it was technically broken. Not wanting to be without a couch or wasting something that really was kind of ok, we opted to remove the legs and let the couch sit directly on the floor. This is by no means ideal, however, it allowed us to continue to get life out of a piece that certainly has life left in it. If this was meant for a more seen location - like our living room - we would likely look to fix the damage and restore the piece.
Taking apart a furniture flip- One of our most straight forward aspects of this project was the media console. For this, we simply had to take it apart, sand and paint. While the sanding took much longer due to some deep scratches - the hardest part was putting the pieces back together. As an older piece of furniture, the existing hardware had nearly melded to where it specifically went and we didn’t take care to label that thinking everything could just go back on with out any issue. This certainly came to be untrue when we switched and swapped hardware for various spots when reassembling. If you’re working with an older piece or older hardware, do take the time to label where each bit goes and keep them together.
Walls are never going to be perfectly (or consistently) straight/flat - This was by far one of the most frustrating realizations of this project and maybe houses/builds in general. Walls are simply imperfect but typically looking at them you’d never know. Thankfully this wasn’t too big of a problem for us since we made our own template from scratch to begin with to account for these unique walls, however, if we hadn’t or if the walls were considerably warped, it would have been a nightmare.
Measure everything twice and double check your plans - We didn’t make a mistake to not measure twice and double check, but we took this advice from many DIYer’s and are thankful we did. From the MDF countertop to the heights and depths of the cabinet or fridge, it saved us from making the wrong cut or buying the wrong sized cabinets.
