The bruise wall is no more

<- Let me introduce you to the bruise wall.

Now a little background... When Little Spaghetti was two weeks old, we signed the papers to buy our first home. It's a beautiful 1960s ranch in the neighborhood we've always wanted to live in. It has a great layout, but it came with (what I'm pretty sure was the original) seafoam green shag carpet, and was marketed as "a handy man special," read: lots of broken, old, and disgusting stuff going on.

This was wildly exciting, but - in retrospect - also completely insane. We had two weeks to move out of our little apartment, and our new house had to be completely renovated before we could move in. To make a long story short, we moved in, and have spent what sometimes feels like endless hours in the past 10 months remodeling this house. We painted every room. We put new flooring in the entire house. We tiled a counter and installed a sink. We fixed plumbing, installed blinds, installed faucets. We painted the entire outside of the house. We installed doors. We installed lights. We put in a new stove. And a billion other "little" projects that arise as you get into your "big" projects because that's how remodeling works. I'm sure this isn't the last you'll hear of remodeling.

When we moved in, though, there was one room - a sun room the previous owners added on in 2005 - that was in pretty decent shape. This was the room we lived in for the first two or three months in the house until other areas were habitable. We had our bed in there, the crib, the glider/recliner, a tv, and a futon. We refer to it as "the conservatory" because we're classy like that.

I have very fond memories of spending 99% of my days with my newborn in this room, leaving only to venture to the bathroom because for large spans of time the rest of the house had only bare subfloor. We slept in this room, we ate in this room, we dressed in this room, we nursed in this room. Never mind the fact that there were no blinds on the windows back then so our new neighbor next door, Terry, and her elderly mother got to watch us like we were in some kind of fish bowl. I was a new mother...I didn't have the energy to be modest. I spent my days with Little Spaghetti reclined on my knees. I occupied my time taking cell phone pictures of him. Proof:
(The ninja-baby headband pictures are my faves. Apparently I also wore the same pajama pants a lot.)

Anyway, as we moved into the rest of the house, we slowly filled up the conservatory with things that didn't go anywhere else in the house. In other words, it became a giant storage room. But now, I'm reclaiming this room. It's one of my favorites in the house, and it's time it got spiffed up, too.

The room was decked out with a hideous poker wallpaper border that provided lots of entertainment to my six week old back in the day. The walls were a terrible shade of light purple, and one wall had been sponge-painted with darker and lighter shades of tan and purple. This wall we have referred to lovingly as "the bruise wall." I'm not kidding, folks, it looks like someone beat the crap out of it.

Well...it used to anyway. It doesn't any more because THE BRUISE WALL IS NO MORE. And we are one step closer to having the conservatory finished! The room is prepped and primed. Stay tuned for the final reveal.