Sneak peek painting

This weekend was an epic work weekend full of painting and projects.

First I pushed all the furniture into the middle of the room, tarped it and put paper on the whole floor. Then I removed the blind and all various hooks, hinges and miscellaneous hardware from the walls. Some of it had been painted over so many times there was no discernible screws to unscrew and I had to pry it loose with my hammer. In the window. While passengers waiting for the bus outside watched. It was interesting. then all the holes, cracks and dents were sanded and patched. All included the prep of the room took about eight hours over two days. It was sort of insane and definitely my least favorite part of painting. 

I actually hit the walls with the first coat of trim Thursday night. Already looking brighter. Somehow I forgot to/procrastinated on doing the glass double doors. Those were tackled Friday.

After the second coat of white on the trim I started in on the gray and that's where everything went wrong. I believe some sort of alien plastic slippery paint was used on the walls originally. Also there were five thousand previous coats and the corner where the heater sits had clearly had a miniature explosion of some kind where the wall was warped and melted. The result of which was that none of the edges of any of the moldings were straight or clean. This meant that my original plan to cut in versus taping (my usual preference) had to be reassessed after two hours of painstaking hand painting edges resulted in some pretty terrible looking results. So I went back and taped. I also ran out of paint about 11pm and was not able to finish the first coat. I was at the hardware store at 8:05 am the following morning to pick up more paint. I'm not even ashamed at how often I'm there anymore.

After three coats of gray the color was much more even, and despite it drying a whole lot darker than the color I picked, it's shocking how much darker, I actually liked it. I  had wanted to go for a medium to dark gray but had been too afraid so I picked a lighter one to be safe and ended up getting what I originally wanted. Funny how that works.

I then took all the tape off (always dramatic and exciting) and then went back over the entire room with this teeny tiny brush. Touching up all the edges. For five hours. It was tedious and even so I still had to let go of perfection early on. It's an old building I kept telling myself. This is all character and charm I said out loud to an empty room. I think the fumes may have gotten to my head. Who knows. 

I will have some after pictures later this week when I have finished all of the other projects and assembled the rest of the room.