Crackpot Quilters’ Blog

The past few weekends I worked on a crackpot project that has been long in coming – painting my bedroom. I bought my condo 5 years ago, and all the painted surfaces (walls and ceilings) have been a color I refer to as Contractor Beige the entire time. I’d been planning on painting my bedroom blue for most of those 5 years. The beautiful blue skies and buildings we saw in Morocco finally pushed me over the edge.

Here’s the result:

Some thoughts on painting…

1. People who say painting is cheap must already own their painting supplies. And buy cheap paint. I didn’t have any paint supplies, and a trip to the local home store with a long list of everything but the paint set me back about $200. Add in high-quality paint, and the price keeps going up.
2. Painting the ceiling is no fun at all. When using white paint on white primer, it’s really hard to figure out which areas have been painted and which haven’t.
3. When the guy at the paint store recommends a product, believe him. The edger is great.
4. No-VOC paint is great for people (like me!) sensitive to paint fumes. I used Benjamin Moore Natura and I didn’t notice any aroma until I was nearly done with the room – and even then, it was vastly less smelly than normal paint. I ended up having to do two coats on the walls, but according to the woman I talked to at the paint store when I picked up the second gallon, that’s fairly common for this paint. I’d much rather do two non-smelly coats than one smelly coat.
5. Taking a ceiling fan/light down requires two people, but it is possible for one person to put it back up.
6. When the fan manual doesn’t know what color the wires coming out of the ceiling are, consult the internet – there is a standard configuration.
7. I hadn’t expected painting to be quite so much work, or give me as much of a sense of accomplishment. I had some help for moving things out of the room, but did all the prep and painting and moving things back into the room all by myself.

I still need to do some touch-up work (blue spots on the ceiling – whoops!). But that can wait.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 26th, 2010 at 10:39 am and is filed under Crackpot Projects, Non-Crafty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.