Another room transformed…
5 minute read
May 19, 2018, 10:40 PM
A second room in my house meets the paintbrush. As you may recall, I painted Elyse’s bathroom a few weeks ago, and now, while Elyse was out on a trip to Japan, I painted her bedroom. This was a much-anticipated paint job, because the basement bedroom was, to put it nicely, the only weird room in the house. While the rest of the house had white trim, the trim in the basement bedroom was a blue color. That color, along with the wall color and the ugly chandelier, worked with the previous owner’s furniture, which involved muted colors. With my furniture in it the color scheme doesn’t work. So I fixed it.
The color that we chose was Behr “High Speed Access”, which is a medium gray color, in satin finish. I strongly recommended that Elyse go with a neutral color for the walls, because she intended to put lots of different things on her walls, and that would avoid having colors on the wallhangings clash with the walls themselves. And then the trim was getting painted white. That part was non-negotiable. The rest of the house had white trim, and Elyse’s room was getting that, too, to achieve a consistent design language. I have a few other “design language” issues with the house that I want to correct as well, such as doorknobs and light switches, but this was a relatively easy one that I knew how to do.
I started the morning after Elyse left, getting “before” pix:
The last photos of the room in the old colors, taken mainly in order to ensure that I put everything back the way it was supposed to be when I was finished. Then I moved some furniture and started eradicating blue trim:
The first bit of white paint on the closet door. That blue trim absolutely must die.
The main door to Elyse’s room partially repainted.
The doors to Elyse’s room, following the first coat of white paint. I did a second coat of white after this all dried to achieve complete coverage.
All in all, I did about half of the trim on that first day, going around the doors, the closet, and behind the bed.
Then the next day, I broke out the roller and started doing the walls in the section where I’d been working. One thing that I quickly discovered was that the new paint color went on light and then dried darker. That presented a minor problem, because when wet, it was somewhat difficult to distinguish which areas had been painted and which ones had not. I ended up working around this by painting for a while, taking some rest time to allow things to dry (and thus darken), inspecting my work, hitting the spots that needed more paint, and then continuing.
The first gray paint goes on around the door.
Two walls done. That chandelier is starting to look a bit out of place, don’t you think?
This photo illustrates the challenge that the paint’s application color presented. The section to the left is painted and has dried. Then down the middle of the photo is a section that has been painted and is still wet. To the right of that is unpainted wall. Find the border between the unpainted section and the wet paint. It was enough to make a person crazy, but I managed.
The walls are gray all the way to the back of the room.
I made one change in what was “trim” and “wall”, and that was the cover for the circuit breaker panel:
This door, with trim and everything around it, was previously painted like it was part of the wall. I considered it a door and trim, and painted it accordingly, i.e. in the trim color.
So in my two days off of work, I did about half of the room. Not too shabby. After everything was complete here, I put the furniture back and then started moving the furniture in the other half of the room, as well as taking down the curtains. And then it was back to trim work:
A first coat of white trim around the window.
A first coat of white trim around the sliding door.
Painting behind where Elyse’s desk usually lives. Again, the blue trim must die.
And then once the trim was done, it was back to the roller.
Then after that dried, I did the edging, and I came to a wonderful realization: I was done. All I had left to do was to let the edge work dry, check it, hit any spots that I may have missed, remove the tape, and then put the furniture back.
And here’s the end result:
I think that the room looks a lot better than it did before, now that the trim matches the rest of the house, and the walls are painted to go with whatever decorating ideas that Elyse has in mind. I’m looking forward to seeing what she puts on the walls.
And then my next project will be new chairs for the dining table. We got that table and chair set at Freight Sales Furniture in Arkansas back in 1992, in preparation for our move to Virginia, and while the table is still in very good condition, the chairs have definitely seen better days. I bought chairs on Home Depot’s website that match the chairs in the kitchen, and so I’m assembling them and then staining them to match the table. Should be a fun time.
Categories: House