Lessons I Learned While Painting

It is Tuesday and I really couldn't think of anything to do for Self-Portrait Tuesday. The challenge was to document what we would be giving ourselves for Valentine's Day. Well, I do have to admit that Valentine's Day is a hard one for me. I would have liked to do many little cutesy things for friends and co-workers, but really couldn't think of that either. I really can't think of what I would actually be able to give myself. So, no SPT.

I do have some lessons to share, however. The house we bought is nice, older, but nice. It's in really good condition (one day I'll put pics on shutterfly for you Aunt Pam since you haven't seen any pics of it yet). Anyway, the walls are all plain, which is good. We painted the downstairs bathroom and it still needs some touch up work. We also wanted to paint our boys' room as the next project. Gunnar got to pick the colors, as the older brother. He loves blue, of course. We looked through all the sample books and found the Glidden Team Colors brochure where Gunnar found he liked the Seahawks colors - how convenient as that is our local NFL team! So, we have blue, green & gray. He found a design he liked and so we all agreed and away we went.

LESSONS LEARNED in no particular order . . .

1. DO NOT wear your favorite Old Navy pajama (yoga style) pants because you will never be able to find replacement for them when you get paint on them!

This was not even at the end, this was toward the start, so not good!

2. Finish ALL taping including where the wall meets the carpet BEFORE you letting a 2-year old loose with a paint roller. Also, we didn't tape off the door/window frames because we bought this cool edger tool and after using it on the bathroom project, we knew we theoretically wouldn't need to tape off the framework & ceiling, so we didn't. The ceiling is out of reach for aforementioned 2-year old, but door frame is not out of reach. I wasn't planning on painting the frames, but I guess I am now.

"What? I was painting where I was supposed to . . ." says 2-yr old.

3. Do NOT get paint under fingernails. I am not sure how to avoid that, but it's kind of a pain to get that paint out of from under there.

4. Do NOT expect to finish project all in one day. I am sure some people could do it, but not us people. I really, really would have liked to finish it, but wait until you see the pics of what we were painting. I had totally unrealistic expectations.

5. Buy extra rollers so that you don't have to wash and use for color change. That just doesn't really work well. Being the cheap skate, I thought washing and reusing would be fine, but not when trying to do two colors in one day.

6. Buy extra refills for edger tool. It works great, but I think it's meant to be disposable and use refill pads for it. Trying to use edger tool with old-school popcorn ceiling was a little challenging, but it still worked pretty well.

7. Lastly, do NOT do designs involving clean lines with textured walls. Well, you can if you want to spend several hours of touch up. No matter how much you try to get the tape stuck down well enough to not seep through, it does NOT work. My fingertips and hands were starting to feel raw because I was trying so hard to press the tape down into all the little textures. It didn't seem to make a difference and it was wasting my time pressing tape over and over!

Here's some more pics of our project, which is still not quite done, but it's really close. We wanted to paint before we put but the boys' bunk beds. For those who have seen the homemade beds know how massive and heavy they are, so we really wanted to finish painting before the beds got up. But, good news is that we finished putting up the beds over the weekend. Gunnar has his "tent" on the top, we did it a little different this time and it looks pretty good actually.

Gunnar did OK, but as you see he didn't stay where he was supposed to either - inside the "teeth" wasn't supposed to have gray paint.

Even though painting is not first activity of choice, my husband did help which was greatly appreciated.

Lovely me . . .

We are glad Gunnar decided he wanted the "teeth" to be blue instead of the walls. The blue would have been too dark on all walls.

Sample of what the "teeth" look like - it turned out pretty well actully. I am pretty happy with it, even thougth it was really more time and work than I wanted it to be!