Saturday was spent at Home Depot picking out paint colors for our studios. For me (and Josh) a trip to Home Depot is dreaded. I find the place to be completely overwhelming, filled with potential that is totally not accessible to us. I see pretty light fixtures and immediately feel my whole body tense up with thoughts of “how the heck would this be done?!” “what if i get the wrong one and it can’t be used?” “who would put the new lighting in for us?” “would they charge us too much because we don’t know what we’re doing!!?” “what if they needed to rewire something?!” so I give up and instead of cool new pendulum lighting I settle for the 80′s glass square fixtures that came with our house. One day.
I go through this process with everything at Home Depot. Putting in a french door, a new bathtub, molding, tiles in the bathroom floor, back splash…you name it, I want to do it and have no idea how. Paint seems to be the easiest decision even though I never have a plan or a scheme in mind. My idea of a plan is gut instinct and hope I’m right. I’m the queen of “make it work” so when I had a gallon of Martha’s light gray picked out with a quart of “dusk” (a purply gray) I felt content with that decision. All over light gray, accents in purply gray. I get back to the counter and the man says to me “I hope I got this right, I dropped the paint samples as soon as you guys walked away” a quick glance and I realize I now have a gallon of purply gray and a quart of gray. I decide that this is the paint gods sending me a message to go all out and say “yup, this is fine”.
Sunday I got to work. Let me just say that painting is a great arm exercise! I got two walls painted in a process that can only be called “half-assed” if my dad was here it would not have approved of my method. Instead of moving furniture out of the room I just moved it to one side. I then covered the floors with that plastic floor/furniture protector and lined the base boards in blue painters tape. I started rolling away. “this is easy!” I thought to myself as I watched the off-white walls turn to lavender and then finally settle into their dark gray purple.
I noticed that I accidentally touched some of the white base boards with my purple roller.
Good thing the previous owners left all the extra paint with labels. I was covered. By the time I painted the middle of the wall I settled on the floor to start painting above the trim and around sockets. At one point I just painted the entire socket and plates because it started to annoy me. And then I moved to the top where I did the best I could to avoid hitting the ceiling with my purple paint. I did this about four times, and those spots mock me.
It looks good! I’m a professional!
Nope. On wall number two I forgo the drop cloth and painters tape all together. At this point I took a break to clean the rollers and when I came back an hour later the excess water in the rollers created a huge mess of streaky paint water running down the walls. Idiot. In shock I rip my shirt of, a shirt I deemed appropriate for painting in and started mopping up the floor. I recover, and repaint the wall. All is good. And I keep going until half the room is painted. Towards the end, the old paint in the tray was drying and starting to peel off into the new paint creating a “goo”. I debated how a professional would handle it. I just kept going scrapping off the wobbly bits as I went along.
I found that the painters tape, for me, only created the illusion of a perfect divide between new paint and white trim. It was wobbly and I gave up on the whole thing too soon, deciding to go back over my mistakes with white paint later.
Anytime you need help with a project talk to your dad first so he can give you tips. Especially with painting he is the pro!
I once painted a room a light blue and got so much on the ceiling that I just painted the ceiling blue too. But I didn’t have enough paint to do two coats so some of the white showed through. It looked really nice, though. Kind of like the sky (or that’s what I kept telling myself)
One of the best things about the Home Depots in our area is the helpful staff. I wanted to make a telephone out of PVC piping for the kids in my kindergarten to practice reading into. They had a tendency to read very loudly and if they read into the phone, the noise went through the phone and into their ears so it quieted them down. And they LOVED reading like that. But I didn’t know what sizes to get and how to attach the elbows (for the curved parts) so I talked to the staff. They were so excited about the idea, they got other sales people to come help, and by the time they were done, they had a contraption that three or four kids could use at one time and one was designing an over the head phone so they wouldn’t have to hold it while reading. Long and short of it is, don’t be afraid to talk to the staff because no matter how stupid my question has been (and there have been some doozies), the staff has always been super helpful.