First Home Update: Painting the Bedroom

I have serious problems with doing things the correct way. I like to jump into things headlong, with no consideration for technique and too much pride to watch many tutorials. It'd be easier to simply watch a video about painting a room if you've never done it before and then paint, but noooo....not Rabbit. There's some sort of switch in my head that gets turned on when I take on a new project that says, "You can figure this out on your own. Only weak people try to plan things out carefully! Just go for it." Bear, as I learned, is much like this, too. We're a match.

I am learning otherwise via my first home update: painting the walls. As Bear and I painted the bedroom on Saturday (how could it take 6 hours? I don't know. I know that that's actually pretty quick for two people to paint a rather large room all on their own, but Jeebus, somehow I thought it was so much quicker than that), we learned some very important lessons. First, though, our finished color:

Thanks to our wonderful homeowners, who are on vacation, we were allowed to borrow their air conditioner for when we finally got sick of the heat and it was too humid for our liking.

Our first lesson was that paint is expensive. Thankfully Bear signed up for a mover's package from transferring the electric over into his name and came up with a 10% off coupon at Home Depot. I got a $10 off $50+ purchase coupon from Sherwin Williams, but after seeing their prices for paint ($35 a gallon even for the "lowest" grade!), we decided we'd have to go for Home Depot because we just don't have that sort of money right now. We wanted good (Behr), but not crazy good.  We ended up getting 3 gallons: one for the bedroom, one for the livingroom (which may be a mistake...we may not have enough), and one for the stairwell/accent wall in the livingroom. He wanted semi-gloss, but I was sure that the shininess of the paint would drive me up the walls and it was $1 more, which , by god, is enough to set off the alerts in my head that we are trying to save money here, folks. This isn't a time for splurging!!

So, we finally got around to painting later than we wanted (1pm). We didn't really care about the molding or the baseboard, because we're planning that in a few weeks we're going to repaint that a slate blue and completely replace the molding on the ceiling edges anyway. For the sake of I Have to Do This Right Even Though I Have No Idea What I'm Doing, I basically used up a good deal of the painter's tape for nothing. We used Frog Tape (green instead of blue) based off a recommendation by a professional painter's forum. I really don't know if it's any better or not than blue tape, but it did the job and the only problem I had was peeling the tape off one section that I let dry too much. Don't do that. It's frustrating having to go back and touch up edge sections.

Frog Tape. A bit more on the expensive side as far as paint tapes go, but worth it.

We also should have thought about the type of walls we had. I did recognize that they were smooth, so we needed a lower nap on our rollers. However, I did not recognize that these walls are old paneling...which means those long gutters that go from floor to ceiling are very hard to get at with a roller. It wasn't until we got into the third wall of the first coat that we sat back and said, "Hey, just like we're painting the borders with a brush first, maybe we should go up and down the gutters, too, to make sure we don't waste paint, make it an even paint job after we go over it with the roller, and get into the nooks and crannies."

Bear starts a little test section at the beginning before we moved our headboard out.

They see me rollin'...they hatin'. Tryin' to catch me paintin' dirty. (please notice, after the horrible joke I just made, Bear rolling over the gutters we painted down earlier)

Rabbit paints the top edges while standing on a chair. Not OSHA approved.

Bear also flaunts OSHA-disapproved painting techniques right in front of a window for them to see.

 Again, keeping energy levels up when working in a place with no air conditioning during a very hot summer means eating right. We didn't have breakfast and by 3 we were starving. I saw a downtown place in Small Town that advertised that it had the "best Reuben around" with fries for $8.50. First of all- yum, Reubens. Second of all, that is definitely a challenge. I've had Reubens in all the big cities I've visited, even one at a family owned, long-time run Jewish deli (and those guys could definitely make a Reuben right). I've had a few in Big Town and enjoyed them, but...well...

It was mind-blowing at the Pub. The fries were fresh cut and sprinkled with thyme. It was a HUGE plate and the corned beef was thick-cut. Look at that delicious marbled rye bread. I think they just beat out the Jewish deli. Both Bear and I dug in after a hard 1/3 a day's work and then shambled back up our incredibly steep hill to paint some more after sweating out all that deliciousness. On our way up the hill, we were happy to notice that the music in the park carries up to us like a natural amphitheater, so we'll get nice serenades every so often even up at our home! Bear promised, as we panted in the heat, to take me to the Cafe in the park twice a month. That's very romantic for Bear, and if I didn't know better I would think it was the heat making me swoon.

After we got home, we started up on the second coat and finishing the closet wall, which thankfully didn't have any paneling.

First coat down, one more to go.

And there you have it. We put down one more coat and that was that. I have found out after this, that Bear and I are not exactly the most patient of people. Patience is probably something that is very important with updating a Home. Okay, we need to work on that one. But we learned a lot of important lessons about painting rooms, and that's what this whole thing is about. Our homeowners are nice enough to let up make updates and try our hand at improvements, so it's basically a test-run for if we ever want to own our own home. Even our "disasters" (like getting paint on the baseboards) are pretty small in the whole scheme of it all. One room down, one room and a hallway to go!

See you soon,
-R