Accentuate that wall

While the kitchen renovation speeds along at the pace of a turtle with a broken leg, I took it upon myself to tackle the accent wall. The wall itself was in poor shape at the beginning - like most of the homes in the area there had been a cut-through in the lower half of the wall so you could see what was going on in the basement (also, my neighbors explained, it helped the warmth of the fireplace circulate upstairs and heat the house; in turn, that explained why our fireplace heats the downstairs and only the downstairs). When the hole was covered over the patch job was shoddy and noticeable, so Joe decided that he would skim-coat the entire wall. Skim coating means to apply a thin coat of drywall compound over the entire surface. Great! It'll hide all the flaws and (bonus!) give us a completely flat wall which will be easier to create an accent pattern on. Turns out, "bonus!" was a mess - after skimming the entire wall you have to sand the entire wall and we underestimated the mess - there was drywall dust on every surface of our house, from my jewelry box in our bedroom to the fireplace mantle around the corner and down the stairs. It was madness! But it DID look good, so we soldiered on and I painted the first coat of white. The first coat of white revealed what the naked eye had not - there were thousands, literally thousands, of tiny pinholes in the newly sanded drywall. Pinholes are tiny so sometimes the paint would fill them in, sometimes not so much, and sometimes there would be a patch so enthusiastically pockmarked that Joe couldn't stand it and he went back over and spackled it and re-sanded. Those are the kinds of moments when you're not sure if your relationship really could handle DIYing the rest.