Painting with a purpose

I spent this Easter weekend painting the spare room for my Mum who has decided to move in with us while she waits for her new house to be built.

As usual the uber stinky primer/sealer went on first and I did leave it for two days this time, which seems to have made a huge difference.  No headaches and only one almost fainting spell!

So here's the progress pictures:

Thanks goodness there's no carpet of floorcoverings in there yet as I had a bit of an accident .. oops!

The primer/sealer had been sitting undisturbed for about 2 months so I asked Alex to give it a shake to try and mix it up again before painting.  Unfortunately, being a 15L tin, it was quite heavy so despite us each giving it what we thought was a good shake, when we opened the tin it was still slightly separated.

I knew I had to mix it properly and didn't want to go out to Bunnings and get them to re-shake it, so I sent Alex out to the garage for Peter's drill and went and found the paint stirrer.  We fitted the paint stirrer to the drill and Alex, after lots of cautioning from me, started the drill up very slowly and did a pretty good job of stirring the primer back together.

Then, me being me, I had to have a go at this stirring business as Peter wouldn't let me do it last time he had the drill out.  I figured it couldn't be that hard to keep the paint in the tin .. I mean how much paint can one little stirrer move at a time?

Turns out .. quite a bit:

I thought I was starting the drill slowly but obviously it wasn't slowly enough.  Once the boys realised I wasn't going to somehow make this their fault (as they would have done to each other), they were all peeing themselves laughing. 

The first thing Andrew said after he stopped laughing was .. and I kid you not .. "where's the camera?" 

Followed closely by "Will you kill me if I put this on facebook?"

After assuring him that I wouldn't kill him if he put it on facebook, luckily he lost all interest in highlighting my failing to the known universe so it remains here on the relative privacy of my blog.

 It was all squishy between my toes which was quite gross but luckily I managed to not get any on the tiles in either the hallway or the bathroom as I did some rather awkward hopping to the bathroom.  I plonked myself down on the edge of the bath (very uncomfortable .. should have got a flat sided bath!) to try and wash the worst of it off with turps, soap and water then was straight back into the painting.

Which reminds me .. need to buy more turps; industrial size bottle this time I think!

My tradie's curse strikes again ...

I just don't seem to have much luck picking tradies to do work at this house. 

The concreters were dodgy as slightly lacking in customer service and work ethics (still waiting for them to come back and seal the coloured concrete "liquid limestone" and we've been here 18 months!)

I think the painters I chose to paint all the areas with high ceilings used water based sealer instead of the oil based sealer I know the walls needed .. but we'll just have to wait and see on that one.

And then there's the landscaper.  He seemed like such a good bloke (and still does) but I think he's just too young/disorganised/lacks time management skills to be in business for himself.  I suppose I should have learned from how long the front yard took to be done but I thought I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and booked him to do the back yard, which he started in November. 

I don't know if he underquoted or was just sick of the job but he just really wasn't interested in finishing it off.  It took us threatening to post nasty things the truth on his facebook page for him to finally come back and finish the job ... in February!  It isn't done to the standard that we would have liked but it is finally done so I'm just going to live with it and see what happens ...

Painting games ..

or more accurately, painting the games room.

Now that the tiles are finished and we have painstakingly sealed the grout to avoid it turning to (a) crap (colour) too quickly, it's time to put some colour on the walls.

Colour can be interpreted oh so many ways, especially in this house, as I'm surrounded by males who really don't understand that there is a difference between beige, taupe and tan.  Then when they start throwing in random words thinking they might be paint colour names, I usually throw up my hands in despair and run off to Bunnings by myself.

Luckily, Peter has realised that his life runs much more smoothly if he defers to me on colour choices (the majority of the time anyway) and it's only taken nearly 20 years of marriage .. lol!

I chose the same neutral colour that we had in the last house, as he seemed to like it (Well, I didn't get any negative comments so I think that means he likes it).  It's another Taubman's colour called Athena and once again, we went half strength.

I rollered all the super-stinky primer on one day and left the whole room open all night to let the stench escape before going back in the next day to paint.  One day is definitely not enough to get rid of the stench .. might try two days next time I paint anything.

Anyway .. here's the finished product:

Luckily, there weren't any major spills on the new tiles.  All we have to do now is put the curtains back up and move the furnitutre back in.  We'll get around to buying some decent furniture eventually but for now the boys are abusing using a couple of futon lounges .. perfect for getting their sloth impersonations down pat!

The Office

Not the TV show .. our home office.

I promised some pictures of after the painting so here we go.  I cannot believe how much 'stuff' we have in here already and there's still several boxes of Peter's extra office stuff to be unpacked .. looks like they're staying packed up for quite a while longer 'cos there's no room!

 

 

I love the smell of paint in the morning ...

The oil-based undercoat sealer/primer .. not so much.  That stuff stinks so much I'm sure we could have sold tickets to those wanting to get high!!

Trouble is, because we have brand new plaster that has never been painted before, all the painting places recommend using the oil based sealer to prevent the plaster sucking the water out of water based paint, resulting in the paint peeling off in sheets a short time after being put on.  Or something like that anyway .. I kind of tuned out once I had my first whiff of the sealer!

We are hoping to get the tiles done soon and the original plan was to tile the office as well.  In the last house, we had pillow top tiles (slightly domed finish) and the edges of the tiles and the grout lines were a fair bit lower than the centre of the tile.  Due to the profile of those tiles, the finish on the tiles was totally ruined by the office chairs rolling into and out of the grout lines.  We didn't want that to happen again as we're planning on being here a while, so we decided to buy a piece of vinyl flooring and put chair mats down instead of tiling.

(The fact that we had nowhere to put all of the furniture while everything was being tiled may have contributed to this decision too!)

Once the decision was made to bring all of the office furniture into the office, we thought it might be a good idea to paint the room first so we didn't have to move it all out again in the near future.

Peter put the sealer on while I was at work and I'm sure I could smell it from the corner of our street when I was coming home ... it's that strong!  We waited a couple of days for the smell to die down a bit before painting. 

Luckily, we actually agreed on a colour for a change.  It's called Taubmans Sheer Hose but we got it in half strength as the office is on the south side of the house and doesn't get any direct sunlight, so I thought the full-strength version would be way too dark.

As is typical, as soon as I started the cutting in process, I freaked out that I had chosen a colour that was way too dark/purple/brown/gross/etc, just because I'm so used to staring at bright white plaster walls.  Once Peter started the rollering, it didn't seem so bad after all and now I'm even thinking of painting the ensuite and toilet in the same colour.

I couldn't find the camera, so the only pictures are ones that I took with my dinosaur of a mobile phone:

 

 

It's one of those paint colours that looks completely different at different times of the day and now that I've realised that, I like it.  I haven't got any photos of the finished room yet but I'll try to get on that soon.