Tuesday, May 29, 2012

paint and moose and paint

My hands are covered in three different colors of paint. Actually, four. Well, actually, i lie---because i did manage to shower before work this morning and scrub off most of it. There is still some unknown white color on my finger nails. Clearly, the trauma of spending three days straight painting has not washed off.

We spent the weekend painting:
  1. bamboo forest bedroom
  2. teal dining room
  3. dark blue accent living room wall
  4. light grey-blue bathroom
  5. enough touch-ups to walls to kill anyone

Here's the's the problem. Wait, first, here's the moose mama and her brand new twins from our backyard for you to look at while i bitch. They were super cute--she musta just dropped um.

 So, the problem is this, aside from the fact that i have NO expertise in painting and all our walls are strange heights and shapes, the old owners left the color they painted the walls, but not the ceiling. Should be an easy fix right--get some samples, paint little corners, blah blah. Well, here's what i have to say to all you DIY junkies---pffffffffft. I mean that in the nicest possible way. We went and got a million paper samples of the whites, held each up to the ceiling, eliminating all of the creams, grays, etc. We finally found a potential match and headed off to home depot for what must have been the 5th time in two days. They mixed up one of them three dollar containers and we headed back to the house, where i climbed my little ladder and painted in three different places. There's something about the lighting in the house that makes it so that the same color looks completely different in three places in the same room. Strangely, the pure white color i thought we had picked had a strange pinkish/brownish hue to it. Just enough that it looked like a cross between the old wall color and the ceiling. Mostly out of frustration we decided it was close enough. I hopped back in the car for HD round 6--where i insisted that they give me not only a quart of the offending pink/brown/white, but also pure honest to god white. Low and behold when the offensive color came out, it looked NOTHING like the sample. Seriously. So, that left me with THREE (yes i am using screamy capitals on purpose) different whites and i headed off home. Needless to say, i don't think we did find the "perfect" match, but it is close enough that unless i tell you we are playing spot the cover-up, you probably aren't going to notice.

Here's what i learned about painting this weekend:
  1. Buy an edger at the start and don't load it heavily with paint.
  2. Don't even try to free hand. Seriously.
  3. Don't ever color match to a different store--it will result in the loss of half a day's work and you will have to redo the whole thing because the colors will NOT be the same. 
  4. Invariably, you are going to get paint EVERYWHERE, including but not limited to floors, hair, face, and dog. 
Before and after photos as soon as we get all the art/pictures/SEA paraphernalia mounted on the walls. 




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