The Magical Vanishing Cabinet

So when we moved in to our house, it had a huge weird cabinet / shelving unit (oddly, like all the other "cabinets" in our house, it was an open-backed box with shelves sitting on ledger boards.  Also like all the other "cabinets" in the house, this one lacked doors-- some previous owner had a serious fear of cabinet doors) in the master bedroom.  We decided it had to go right away, so this happened about two hours after we closed on the house:

Yup, we started tearing it out.  We were whacking it with hammers, ripping it off the wall with a pry bar, and laughing like maniacs.  It felt great.  And then we were left with roughly 37 million square feet of damaged wall.  Not just a little messed up, but, like, DAMAGED.  The wall had really bonded with the shelves thanks to fifty years of paint (mostly peach, ugh), and our enthusiastic demo actually pulled the paper layer off the drywall in spots, leaving old crumbling gypsum.  Also, there was some dark brown stuff-- the whole thing was kind of like that video we all watched in Family Life class where the lady gives birth.  You know the one.  Anyway, after a quick trip to the Home Depot, we attacked its postpartum funk with a huge tub of spackle.  And we'd forgotten to buy putty knives, so we applied it-- quite thickly, I might add-- with old butter knives.  Classy:

At some point in the middle of all this, we also hung our old velvet blackout curtains and new blinds in this room (chronology is a bit fuzzy for me at this point) and moved in the furniture.  And after letting the inches-thick spackle dry for a couple of weeks, I sanded it.  For hours.  It sucked.  I was sneezing powdery white stuff for days.  The cleanup was even worse than the sanding-- basically everything we owned was coated in a layer of fine powder.  But I felt so proud when it finally looked like this:

Ready for paint, right?  You can barely even SEE it!  I patted myself on the back.  All that sanding really paid off!  Yet another awesome DIY project completed.  I am an unstoppable force in home renovation! Hear me [sneeze spackle dust]!

We picked paint (read: I brought home 67 different greige paint chips and asked Ray which one we should use;  he picked one without looking up from espn.com; I shrugged and bought it) and started painting.  

Right away I could tell that my beautiful, perfect patch looked like utter crap.  It was high in some spots, low in others.  My bedside lamp shone up upon the completed paint job, helpfully pointing out every tiny flaw.  I decided to ignore it.  Who's going to be inspecting my bedroom walls anyway?  We turned out the lights and went to bed.

I tossed and turned.  The next morning, I woke up knowing what I had to do.  Out came the spackle and the trusty ol' sanding block again.  A couple hours later, it looked like this:   

And I looked like the abominable snowman.  But it was much flatter.  Still not perfect, but significantly better.  Two coats of paint and a new light fixture (still not sure I love this but it cost me a total of $12, not counting $85 for the electrician that had to come and reassure us about the ELEVEN WIRES stuffed into the junction box, plus reconnect the bathroom exhaust fan that had somehow been routed through said junction box), and it looks like this:

Next up in the bedroom: art, new pillow shams and throw pillows, new bedside lamps, painting our old green dresser gray, and spraypainting all the mismatched hardware to match the antique brass the in the rest of the house.