Painting the weekend away

A strange week, was last week; a week spent mostly without hot water and a few tears shed. These two are consoling each other- Lilly has become very a very snuggly puss since she has been separated from her sister.

Oscar had to sit his PSATs on Saturday morning, so I hired a car on Friday morning and drove up to the house for a weekend of painting. The house was COLD as we still haven't had an oil delivery for heat (we had a new tank put in, and now have to have it inspected before we can get a delivery- hopefully on Tuesday). The cold meant that my painting was slow- in the bar room the primer was just crawling down the wall as I was doing that late at night. Matt brought the kids up on Saturday after Oscar had finished.

I literally spent ALL weekend painting. I got up about 1 pm on Friday, and finished painting at about 1pm on Sunday. My right arm is killing me- I do it all with a brush as I just don't like using rollers. And now, looking at the photos, I can't believe I only did 1 and 1/3rd rooms!!!

I've put in some before photos for full impact. I can't believe how light the pink looks in this first photo- I can assure you it was much darker than that. All pink and cream. I've also moved a lot of furniture around- in fact there are different chairs in the room now - the pink ones weren't quite right.

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER (with the morning sun streaming in through the window)

Later in the day (you can see the pink colour on the wall in the laundry area- haven't tackled that yet)

BEFORE

AFTER

The trim needs a second coat- but I'll do that when I paint the doors. The paint: all Glidden. I really like their colour palette and it's not totally overwhelming in choice. The walls are "barely jade", the dado "slate green" and the trim is "stone white". It needs some paintings etc on the walls, but I want to give the paint a chance to cure before I put any holes in it.

Then the bar room: this is where everything that could go wrong did. I ended up having to scrape off where I'd painted on the window and sand it all down as it just wasn't drying and was running everywhere. We did get a little bit of oil so we could run the heat for a few days and that made ALL the difference.

Matt loves this room, so I wanted to make it very kind of masculine and suave.

BEFORE (all pink and girly with the stupid pink from the doors and windows going all the way up to the ceiling -it's the little things that bug me- and those candy stripe curtains were on both windows.)

AFTER- the corner of the room that I have done. That cupboard in the corner was pink all over- the doors, the trip and once again all the way up to the ceiling. The window also had pink all the way up to the ceiling. Covering up that pink took an number of coats of both primer and paint.

Much more sleek and streamlined. The paint: walls are Glidden "smooth stone" (I love this colour and was considering it for the hall -over all that yellow- but it really goes on unevenly and needs 2 full coats) and the trim is actually Behr "myth". Home depot didn't have the base for the Glidden colour I'd chosen, and I have to say that the Behr was $10 a gallon more expensive and really stinky. In these photos, it looks the colour it's supposed to be, but I was really worried when I first put it on as it looked a weird green.
This room may take a while to finish painting as I have 2 1/2 more walls and 2 pink doors and 1 pink window to go. I think we may need to rethink the furniture in this room too. So far we haven't had to buy furniture or even curtains as I've just been shuffling things around.

Right, so that's it on the house for a while- we're here this weekend as Matt, Oscar and I are going to the Muse concert that we got tickets for months ago. Oh, and we came home to a new boiler in this house so we have hot water and heat again. YAY!