The walls

This pic shows you what the walls and trim looked like when we first purchased the home (minus the furniture). All the walls, and the trim for that matter, had a coat of flat white paint on them and more than a few cracks where the drywall came together. Once the floors were done, I spent a great deal of time trying to hide the cracks with some compound. The walls were also rough and I had to a on several just to smoothen them up. Other walls could just be patched here and there and they were fine. I used regular compound for patch work on the walls, and a vinyl spackling for the cracks. The vinyl has a flexible quality that prevents the crack from reappearing when materials expand and contract over time. It does however take a little longer to dry and is more difficult to sand, so use sparingly.
As for the trim, I sanded them all with medium sanding block just to roughen them up a bit and take of some of the old chipping paint. This was of course after much debate and soul searching. At first I really wanted to bring back the original stained woodwork and strip the paint from the trim. While the stained wood trim is what you would find in most craftsman bungalows, we decided to paint the trim with a cream semigloss oil paint from Sherwin Williams.
At some point I may still consider redoing the trim, but for now we wanted to just freshen it up so we could move in. Check out the finished trim work in the next posting. All things considered, I think it came out pretty well and worked with the paint colors we selected for the walls.