Monday, December 31, 2007

Paint! The Dining Room has Paint!

There's nothing more satisfying than rolling some clean, new paint onto an old wall.

I started with the ceiling, like you're supposed to, rolling on the white paint with my roller attached to a broom handle. It was going really well until the roller pad started to shift off of the roller. I thought I'd push the pad against the ceiling to get it back onto the roller. *SNAP* Broke the broom handle. Roller hits the floor. Good stuff huh? Clean up on aisle 4!
After I finished painting the ceiling (and floor!) I started on the walls. I picked out this khaki/tan color for the living/dining areas and even though I was concerned it would be too dark, I'm actually really happy with it.

Progress pic:
Finished product (just imagine crisp white trim, chair and crown moulding):
If you've read previous posts, you'll know my problem with the trim. It was all replaced in this room back when it was converted to a duplex. The wood is inferior in quality and I wanted to make sure it wouldn't look too bad if it was painted. I painted a little swatch with ceiling paint to see how the wall color would look with white trim.
I'll have to take a sander to the trim's varnish first to make a surface the paint will adhere to. I like the wood with the khaki, but it'll be more cost effective to just paint it rather than replace with good quality wood. The living room retains its original fir woodwork, so I'll be able to have the nice wood with the khaki there. Compromise, right?

There are a couple areas on the walls that need another coat of paint, but after that I'll be able to attack the trim and finish up. I'm thinking that room will become the living room while I redo the real living room next.

I'm almost at the end of winter break and I'm nowhere near as far as I had hoped to be. I guess that's just an old house for you. It eats your life!

4 comments:

We are in said...

This is HUGE! You have paint on the walls! I like the color. I tried to do a "mocha" color in our front room but the light wasn't right and it looked like something you'd find in a used diaper. So I continued with the sage green that seems to work everywhere.

I think the white trim will look good. We have the same sort of issue - except we didn't have any trim so we started putting up crappy stuff to paint over.

Sandy said...

I like that color. Hang in there!

Anonymous said...

An alternative to painting woodwork that might otherwise need refinishing is to stain any dings in it as necessary with a similar color, then go over it all with a coat of urethane (satin is classier than shiny). It really makes if feel cleaned up and like new. If the woodwork was originally shellacked, just put a new coat over the old (same with varnish), if it's too dark you can give it the once-over with denatured alcohol first.

Confused yet? Yeah it took me awhile too but thousands of bits of advice later my house looks awesome. You're doing a good job!

Nathan said...

I would have retained the stained wood, but because it was replaced with poor quality wood in the '80s it just wasn't an option. It was so bad that there were lumber stamps that were just stained over and showed. Paint was really the only choice I had besides completely replacing the wood. My credit card told me I couldn't.