ANOTHER post about painting?? That’s what I’m thinking, too! We continue to chip away at finishing interior primer and paint on the whole house. We go over to the house, spend a few hours painting, think we are close to being done, then see all the areas that need a second coat or whose trim hasn’t been painted yet. Or those #%*#$%* areas by light fixtures that are a pain to do.

The rolling application is very satisfying. You cover so much wall in a short amount of time, even when you consider second and third coats. But then there’s the edging, and the trim (which needs at least 24 hours to dry between coats). And the closets (thanks, Laura!). When I start to feel discouraged, I remind myself that we are priming & painting every surface (including ceilings, insides of closets, and raw wood trim that has never been painted) of a decent-size 3 bedroom house that a month ago was covered in cigarette smoke tar. We’ve had a ton of help from our friends. We just need to keep going.

If there’s one takeaway from all this painting, it’s that slow and steady wins the race. I forget this whenever starting a painting project. It seems easy and you just want to get that paint up on the walls already! However, if you go quickly and apply the early coats unevenly, you’ll have to go back in and add more coats and fix the inconsistencies. You really have to zen out and accept the process.

We are almost getting to the fun part of the project: the final layer of painting & putting on color.

Painting the primer was an epic ordeal. Because we were getting rid of smoke smells, we had to coat everything (including closets, doors, all trim) with a serious oil based primer. This primer isn’t one of those nice, low-VOC paints. It’s smelly, gluey to apply, and dries very quickly, which means you have to do as much of it as you can in one go.

It has gone really well. The smell of the paint was as bad as expected, but we wore Niosh masks and powered through it. The other good thing is that its drying time is about an hour, so it didn’t linger too long with open windows on the rooms that we finished. We did 2 coats in many areas. After the TSP wall wipe down, it feels like days upon days have been spent on removing smoke tar from  walls. We were musing that we should get a tax break for the smoke mitigation, since it feels like we are a hazmat clean  up crew that is going through a painstaking & expensive process to make this space clean & healthy again.

In the interest of expediency, we selected our favorite color from the Manor to cover all rooms of the house. It’s a fantastic neutral color that is really versatile. We decided to pick one variation to the monochrome of the house in the bedroom. We wanted dark and elegant. We got a bunch of color samples to test on the walls. Something we learned at the Manor was that a color looks one way on a card at the paint store, but then you paint a big test square on the wall and get unexpected results. A color you thought was perfect looks terrible. Or a color you were lukewarm about looks amazing, and that is the one  you fall in love with. This was the case with our bedroom testing colors.

We were excited to go super dark in the bedroom, but all the dark grays had too much color tone in them (blue, green, brown). Plus, we got a little spooked by the intensity of the colors in a small room. I like dark walls, but every dark wall color inspiration I  found was too dark. On a whim at the paint store we selected a lighter gray to test (“functional gray”) and BOOM! That was a keeper.

Here’s how it looks after the first coat:

We are going to do something a little flashy on the wall behind the fireplace. It’s the first wall you see when you walk in the door and anchors the mantle & fireplace. We’re geoing to paint it a snazzy gold/bronze and build some horizontal reclaimed wood panels. Now this is where it gets fun!