Repairing the water damage

When I had been working on the house, I found out that I had a bit of water damage in the master bedroom. The seam between the old part of the house and the extension was clearly not really waterproof! And the surveyor had complained about the rendering. That was cracked. And that may be how the water got in. The roof itself looked fine! So then I had the wall re-rendered. And that meant I needed to fix the water damage in the bedroom; I needed to make it look smart again, not only for good looks, but also to make sure that I would notice if the leaking would continue. If new damage would appear then the whole exercise would have been for nothing! Let's really hope that wouldn't be the case.

I could also kill two birds with one stone; when I had the house rewired, the electrician had cut a slot in the ceiling. And the paint on the seam had cracked. I could fix that in one fell sweep!

One thing I'm worried about was that if you repaint a surface to pose initially been painted the while ago, you will see the difference. And it is ugly. I wondered what to do with that. I didn't want to paint the entire wall and the entire ceiling. And then I thought of a trick; I would turn it into some decorative feature. I thought I should have some decorative line, then paint to one side of it. Then it would look on purpose! But where do you find a 3 m long decorative line? I decided to go to a nearby DIY shop and rummage in their wallpaper collection. I know you combined decorative bands, and maybe they have something suitable, but when I looked I saw nothing. I probably would have to go with nectar or roll of wallpaper. Luckily some were on sale! And I picked a fairly simple pattern. I could cut that out, stick it on the wall with masking tape, and then paint on one side of it.

Cutting out the pattern was easy with a scalpel. And then I had to actually do it! But I first needed to remove loose paint and loose plaster and have a bit of a session with filler. It was a bit of a faff; I had been too lazy to remove the wardrobe, so there was some uncomfortable lying on top of it involved. But I got it done! And then I could do some firewood sawing while the filler dried, and then I could start the actual painting.

I started with the wall. I gave it one coat, and hoped it would be enough. I let that dry too, and then decided it was good enough. Time for the ceiling! But this time, I decided to go without the decorative band. The white filler blended in so beautifully with the rest of the white ceiling that I thought more white paint would also not stand out. And that saved me some faff! It was no work at all to patch up the white. And then I could go and tidy up. It was a bit of a mess with paint flakes and filler sawdust everywhere! But then I had a bedroom that looked as new… And now I really hope no new damage will appear. And the next job will obviously be to paint the outside wall!

Making a masking strip

Wall painted!

Finished!