Has it already been over a month since the last update?
Yeah…
Things got fairly busy since then. I mean, work being work and this next part really drained me out. Following where I left off, I felt like it was a good time to tweak how my room looked. This is something I had put off for quite a while due to my current desk being hard to move alone, but the day would eventually come.
I originally made this side white so that the light of my RGB strip would bounce nicely. The white paint has gotten kinda dull, had smoke stains from my candles, and I just couldn’t get that off easily. After having spent around half a year at that point in an unbearably white office, I wanted to get rid of the white and replace it with some sort of green. I wanted to settle with more… “natural” colors.
After finally deciding on the new colors, I took everything down at the end of the work week so I could begin first thing Saturday morning.
Little did I know of the struggle that I would soon face.
I knew very well from experience that painting my room is a two-day task. Might as well start with the harder side. I took out as much as I could and managed to sloppily pull and push my desk away from the walls enough for me to paint. Removing the TV is also supposed to be a 2-man job, but managed to do it on my own. Painting itself isn’t that bad once you get past covering all of the edges. Needed two coats of paint, so had to wait for it to dry before going at it again.
By this point it was already the afternoon. I had bought a pair of bigger shelves from IKEA… LACK? I think? I needed assistance from my dad to get these shelves installed and later to help me push the desk back into place. It was already nighttime and still had to put everything back. Around two hours later and that side was done.
My original plan was to do one side Saturday and the next on Sunday, but this took the entire day to do and I was extremely exhausted. There was no way I could do more on Sunday and then survive going to work on Monday. When I woke up the next day and felt the pain crawl up my leg as soon as my foot touched the floor, I knew I needed to rest.
It wasn’t until around Tuesday afternoon that I was feeling fit to continue painting, but I still needed to wait until the weekend. There’s no way I can paint after returning from work. Two more things arrived during the course of the week: a set of SNES reproduction boxes and a new LED strip since I disposed the one I had on the ceiling since 2018.
Even if it’s a bit nerve-wracking to handle those delicate boxes, it’s also kinda therapeutic. The SNES ones kept giving me flashbacks as I remembered how I was given each one. I thought I had forgotten, but those memories were just buried quite deep.
I love you, dad.
Saturday comes rolling and it’s time to paint the other side. Thankfully, this side is much easier to paint than the other side. Two coats of paint and nothing out of the ordinary. It’s wild to see how much a coat of paint changes up a room. This is something that is felt when seen in person, but at this point my room looked “new”.
This would have been a relatively easy paint day and it wouldn’t have taken that long to complete, but me being me, I still had to install the new LED strip.
This meant that I had to go back to the other side of the room and do potentially illegal maneuvers from the ladder in order to reach the edge of the wall. First installing the raceway, then the LED strip with some plastic bits that hold it in place and finally the diffuser cover.
The struggle was worth it. It’s not as bright as having an exposed strip circling the entire room, but it’s good enough and it doesn’t burn retinas. At this point it was only a matter of waiting a week after painting before being able to use adhesive hooks for my wall scrolls without them falling off.
A few weeks later I remembered about my Wii U. I’ve had this in storage since late 2019 (a little bit before I started my current job) because the bag it was in fell from my bed and destroyed the screen on the Gamepad. It was basically a near-repeat of what happened with my original Game Boy Advance. Getting the screen replaced seemed insanely hard, so I just didn’t get around getting it fixed.
Until I felt the urge.
At first I considered trying to find a cheap replacement Gamepad, but that’s practically impossible. Turns out my Gamepad was in really good condition and the screen itself is very cheap on Amazon. At that point I was like fuck it, might as well die trying.
The screen arrived on a Thursday. I originally intended to tackle it the following Saturday, but I had a half work day on Friday. I was at home, alone, and a few hours early. I looked up the guide at ifixit and whacked away at it.
The repair process wasn’t really as hard as I originally expected, but it is quite tedious and it did make my anxiety spike. Thankfully I had this done in around an hour of taking it slow and easy. My Wii U was already homebrewed, but I took this opportunity to get that updated with newer solutions.
Now I’m in the process of adding some real indoor plants to my room. I know I technically need to cover most of my room with plants for their air purifying properties to be noticeable, but tossing in a little tiny bit of clean air still counts. I hope I can take good care of them and have them grow a bit more.
This marks the end of this restoration project. I’m satisfied with how things have turned out. It’s not much, but it’s nice how these changes have made my room cozier. It’s a shame that my friends have moved away because I would love to spend a chill evening with one or two of them here, but it is what it is.
My sleep is still kinda fucked due to work, but there has been a noticeable difference in the quality of my sleep.
On my days off, at least.