On Painting

Last week Corey & I decided we needed to paint our house. The paint job by the people before us was pretty crappy, with lots of paint all over the place (read: red paint on the ceiling, yellow on the cupboards...pretty much everywhere it shouldn't be) and watered down paint that wipes off when we wash the walls. Plus, the bedroom was a really dark and kind of greenish tan that made the whole room seem dark.

Corey is the plain old vanilla in our family, so naturally he wanted to paint everything white. I figure that if we're painting, it needs to be an exciting color. After several days of working on him, and way too many paint chips to count, I talked Corey into a white ceiling with yellow and blue walls. Sounds bright & cheerful, which was just what we were going for.

Corey was excited to paint, and I was excited to paint. That's what we call at win-win. We had our home visit for our adoption on Friday morning, and Corey decided that he would take the rest of the day off so we could paint. We started around 1:00 and figured that we'd be done by about 7:00 or so...

10 hours, $300+, 2 rolls of tape, 576 square feet of plastic, 5 trips to The Home Depot, and 7 arguments later we decided to finish for the night. Can I just say that it was stressful? Apparently painting a room 3 colors isn't the best idea because you have to wait for the paint to dry in between so you can tape it and get decent looking corners. Plus, all the prep work of taping off the windows, floorboard, doors, lights, etc. We ended up going to sleep around 1:00 a.m. and sleeping on the couches downstairs (yep, I slept on a tiny little loveseat, not the most comfortable arrangement in the world) because we still had work to do and couldn't move the bed back in to the room.

Saturday we painted corners and removed the tape...and then realized we should have removed it when the paint was still wet; since we removed the tape after the paint had dried, pieces of paint came off with the tape. So we had to paint again. And do touch ups. And do the corners again. After 3-4 hours on Saturday we were finally finished.

In case I'm ever crazy and say that Corey & I are going to paint another room...please talk me out of it. Really. For the sake of our marriage. It really was that bad.

I did, however, get some exciting pictures. Corey told me that I paint like I eat, I get it all over myself. Apparently that's pretty accurate. I was covered from head to toe in paint, whereas Corey only had a couple of speckles on himself. Both of our feet, though, were completely covered in 3 kinds of paint. Want to take a guess on how long that took to scrub off?

I was already this messy after only doing the ceiling. Impressed?

And of course Corey is practically spotless. It makes me sick.

Trying to look happy after painting for 14 hours isn't as easy as you might think.

We made a bit of a mess...

But our feet got the worst of it.

My lovely foot.

I somehow managed to sit in paint multiple times. Don't ask.

Nicely speckled. I look like an Easter Egg.

Pre-painting.

Before.

After. It makes a huge difference, don't you think?

Really, regardless of what you think of the colors, the right thing for you to say when I ask how you like it is "it looks fabulous, you did a great job." Because after all of the work & money, it should be the best dang paint job the world has ever seen.

I'm really excited, in case you can't tell.