Why is paint so complicated? I mean it should be simple really. You have a room, you need a color, you choose said color, you paint and your happy. But NOO paint is just as complicated as picking anything else in a house, in FACT it's probably harder than most things.
The thing that baffled me the most about paint was that it's not JUST about the color..it's about the finish. Eggshell? What's eggshell? And why do you need a glossier paint in high traffic areas? To WASH the walls? WHO WASHES WALLS?! Well apparently, you are suppose to, cause they get dirty. And the glossier they are the easier they are to clean. Well this was all news to me. Beyond this I also learned that really, in the scheme of things, painting a new wall with new primer and then painting it and adding trim is really relatively simple. It's the existing stuff that makes you want to cry. The prep, the prep will KILL you, drive you mad if you're not careful.
I learned this lesson one Saturday when MB's parental units both came to help with the progress on the house. MB's mom happens to be very helpful and rather good at decorating and design. Me? Not so much. I like simple, although I don't think I'd say I have bad taste, it's just some times I have not the slightest clue about how to go about something. It's like accessorizing your outfit. I can pull the actual outfit together rather well, its the accessories that I lose my nerve on. I'm the same with designing a house. I tend to go with things that are relatively safe and if I don't know what else it needs, I'm none the wiser and the house and my bank account are none the worse for wear. Well on this particular day we decided to tackle the living room. The living room was one of the few rooms that was not gutted. There was a random sort of hay color on the walls and carpet covering a beautiful red oak floor (we have been over this but I have included a before picture of the living room for effect) and wood trim around the windows and doors. Well these were all staying but being repainted. Apparently, you need to wash the walls with TSP(?) Before you paint. You ALSO need to sand down old finish on trim so the paint has something to stick you. I KNEW I wasn't going to like that part. I took wood shop. I know sanding is the most tedious and annoying task there is. Well luckily MB's mom took on the sanding for me (thank God in heaven) so I could go outside and pull weeds out of my poor, neglected garden.
Then we took a little trip to the store and got us some TSP and some sponges and went to work on the walls. YUCK. That's all I have to say. I had no IDEA walls could get so dirty! I'm a bit of neat freak so of course, now that I know how dirty walls get I will be washing them often I'm sure. Again, something you just don't think about in a log house! The water coming off the walls was a nasty greyish/black color. We worked in a wave, MB's mom going first and me following behind the clean up the rest of the grossness. I knew there was one spot that was obviously dirty where 'dude' had had his TV and that was disgusting. By the time we were done I was thoroughly disturbed and the walls were ready.
I learned this lesson one Saturday when MB's parental units both came to help with the progress on the house. MB's mom happens to be very helpful and rather good at decorating and design. Me? Not so much. I like simple, although I don't think I'd say I have bad taste, it's just some times I have not the slightest clue about how to go about something. It's like accessorizing your outfit. I can pull the actual outfit together rather well, its the accessories that I lose my nerve on. I'm the same with designing a house. I tend to go with things that are relatively safe and if I don't know what else it needs, I'm none the wiser and the house and my bank account are none the worse for wear. Well on this particular day we decided to tackle the living room. The living room was one of the few rooms that was not gutted. There was a random sort of hay color on the walls and carpet covering a beautiful red oak floor (we have been over this but I have included a before picture of the living room for effect) and wood trim around the windows and doors. Well these were all staying but being repainted. Apparently, you need to wash the walls with TSP(?) Before you paint. You ALSO need to sand down old finish on trim so the paint has something to stick you. I KNEW I wasn't going to like that part. I took wood shop. I know sanding is the most tedious and annoying task there is. Well luckily MB's mom took on the sanding for me (thank God in heaven) so I could go outside and pull weeds out of my poor, neglected garden.
Then we took a little trip to the store and got us some TSP and some sponges and went to work on the walls. YUCK. That's all I have to say. I had no IDEA walls could get so dirty! I'm a bit of neat freak so of course, now that I know how dirty walls get I will be washing them often I'm sure. Again, something you just don't think about in a log house! The water coming off the walls was a nasty greyish/black color. We worked in a wave, MB's mom going first and me following behind the clean up the rest of the grossness. I knew there was one spot that was obviously dirty where 'dude' had had his TV and that was disgusting. By the time we were done I was thoroughly disturbed and the walls were ready.
I was tasked with painting the ceilings and walls in the two closets in the master bedroom one weekend (mother day weekend mind you) while MB was a away on a boy's fishing trip. Lovely. I spent my Friday and Saturday night's drinking wine, listening to Nora Jones and Reckless Kelly respectively (those were the CD's in the stereo so those are what got played!) and painstakingly painting. It took me forever. I also painted Sunday. I was terrified I was going to mess up cutting everything in and it took me a whole night to do just that. I cut in all the primer. then rolled the primer. Then cut the white ceiling paint being used for the whole thing and then rolled it. All told it took me 3 days. A very long time but I was being meticulous. MB couldn't believe it took me so long. I then spent a Monday night or such finishing the third coat. By this point, I got it. I see why people don't like painting.
Having no idea real idea how to paint, and all of the switch plates being off of everything in the bedrooms, I had no idea how to tackle the living room but MB was confident that I could handle cutting and rolling the living room with primer. So, having a bunch of blue tape in hand, I proceeded to tape off all of the trim and, all of the switch plates in the room. I had primed more than halfway around the room and hallway when MB came in and bust out laughing. "You can just take these off you konw?" No, OBVIOUSLY I never thought of that or I would have done it! (working on a house puts tremendous strain on a relationship, everyone knows that but I kept my mouth shut). The first switch plate MB removed was to a random cable outlet and lo and behold the dumb ass that was the last owner, instead of drilling a proper hole for the cable, just HACKED a big hole in the wall! I was instructed that this would need to be patched before a second coat of paint could be applied, another annoying thing I learned being that all rooms need two coats of paint (and this hole has STILL gone un-patched but we did buy the materials last week to do so). So after all of this work and with some help from MB we had primed all of the bedrooms and ceilings and painted the master bedroom entirely.
This was now two weeks before our party "deadline" and we were getting there but there was still the issue of the floors. This was my big hurdle. It felt to me, as though once the floors were done we would BE there. Everything else was just fluff, but the floors, we couldn't move anything in until they were done and THAT was the big goal!
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