Well, so far its been a great summer! We spent the first week in my home town enjoying our time with family and friends. It was awesome connecting with so many people that I hadn’t seen in years and in some cases decades! I must admit I was thoroughly exhausted after so much visiting and many late nights (I’m actually surprised I can still do that).  So after arriving home, I did take a few days to relax before embarking on big project number 1 – my 12 year old son’s room.

Although it doesn’t seem like that long ago since we completed his Winnipeg Jet’s hockey themed bedroom, his bedding had been the same since he made the big move to his big boy bed over 9 years ago. With the bedding looking very tired and a gaping 3 foot hole on the underside (he caught his foot in a small worn patch), it was in fact deemed necessary to do yet another bedroom make-over.

Goodbye hockey themed room!

Shay has always been very set in his ways. He had a very clear idea of what he wanted, so the design factor was pretty minimal on my part. He wanted a black and white room. The great thing about his colour selection was that it tied in nicely with Eden’s city themed bedroom which is also primarily black and white. In addition to his choice of colours, he already had two navy blue walls in his room, so painting black over the navy was virtually a snap, but the third wall was formerly beige and did require 3 coats to get proper coverage. So, the job began by sanding out the red stripe (a hard and tedious job), patching, priming and finally painting the walls. He chose to have three black walls and one feature wall. The idea of having a primarily black room may seen daunting, but Shay’s room has an incredible full wall of windows plus two additional windows in the main space and yet another smaller window in his walk-in closet.

One of my first jobs was to repair the door knob hole in Shay’s wall. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until I was mid repair that Shay spilled the beans and told me it was actually his dad that made the door knob hole in the wall while trying to do a slam dunk on his over the door basketball hoop. Although I had never directly asked what happened, I had always assumed it was Shay that had done the damage during his endless hours of basketball play in his room throughout the winter months. According to Shay, Tim said “don’t tell mom” ~ of course, this little secret wouldn’t have been as easy to keep had I asked, but I never did. The part I didn’t get was, why is it that I am doing the repair then? When I asked Tim about fixing the wall, he told me it would be a big job and began to list all the steps that it would take ~ to me this translated as – I will do it “someday”. Unfortunately, that seemed like a long way away and if I was going to knock off this project I had to begin by doing my first ever major wall repair. I began to search the web looking for instructions on how to repair a door knob hole and found what seemed like a great tutorial that outlined the steps to fix the hole. I didn’t tell Tim because a part of me wanted to surprise him and show him that I could do it without his help. Here is what the hole looked like.

Here is the hole that was behind Shay’s door.

Here is another shot of the hole.

Click the picture to check-out the full tutorial.

The directions on Snapguide were super easy to follow and I must admit I not only impressed myself with my handy work, but my husband as well! The key to the repair was really leaving the extra edge of drywall paper on the outside edge of the square I cut out.  The overlap of paper helps hold the drywall piece securely in the hole. Made sense and worked like a charm.

I certainly can’t claim perfection, but pretty good for a first try.

Here is the repaired wall. You may also notice that I spray painted the old door knobs. It’s too early to see if they’ll hold up, but so far so good.