The last two days have been a blur.

Yesterday after work I came home, ate, changed clothes, taped off everything in the nursery (as it will henceforth be called), and started painting.

It quickly became apparent that we had a couple of problems regarding paint selection.
#1: The paint was way too yellow. It was far stronger than Kylene had wanted, and as she puts in her own words, “It looks like someone puked sunkist lemons all over the walls.”
#2: The brown that I had painted the office was clearly too dark for any light color (especially yellow) to effectively cover in two coats of paint. We were looking at a 3-coat minimum, with a strong possibility of the ‘ha ha you fool’ fourth-coat whammy.

Not good.

After one coat on the walls, I finally pointed out how bad the ceiling was to Kylene. With the room being drastically lighter, she was able to clearly see the need to paint the ceiling. So while the first coat of paint was drying on the walls, I got out the can of ceiling paint I’ve had in the garage for just this sort of occasion, got my covered roller setup, grabbed my brush, and painted the ceiling.

As the paint dried it got worse, and the brown was still heavily bleeding through.

This is what it looked like at that point.

Yikes. By this time, we were both pretty tired. Kylene was being a good sport cleaning up dribbles out of carpet, handing me things, and chatting to keep my spirits up. Despite us both being tired and at wits end with the paint problems, she did a good job faking a smile for a photo. Even Poly was in on the action, pacing in the hall, sitting in Kylene’s lap…

I put a second coat of paint on the walls in a vain attempt at improving the color and coverage situation, and then we cleaned up and went to bed. I told Kylene that if she got a new color today we’d still get the room done this week. Yikes.

Today, I got home from work, changed clothes, downed a couple hot dogs, and then started working. Kylene had picked up another gallon of that awesome white PVA primer that I used on the MDF cupcake stands, and a new paint color, “Butter”. It’s creamy and smooth.

This was what I came home to:

By 6:30 I had a nice, thick coat of primer trimmed and rolled on the walls.

By 8:30 I had a coat of “Butter” on the walls. It was looking good. The coverage was much better as there wasn’t any brown bleeding through, and the color is one we both like. It’s clearly yellow, but it’s not blindingly yellow. Having gone through 2/3rds a gallon of paint for the first coat, it was obvious I wasn’t going to be able to get the second coat on with the remaining paint.

Queue 8:45 Lowe’s run for more paint, so I could mix cans and not screw up the color.

By 11:00 I had the second coat of “Butter” on the walls. By 12:00 I had the outlet covers and ceiling fan together, and all the paint brushes and rollers cleaned up.

This is what it looks like now. It’ll be interesting to see it tomorrow afternoon.

Two nights, five coats of paint (more than 3 gallons) on the walls, one coat of paint on the ceiling, and one very tired Bryan.

My original goal was to get all the painting done last night, and then get the trimwork cut and nailed in today. That didn’t happen, and with Lamaze tomorrow night, I don’t see how I’m going to be able to get the trimwork done by this weekend… Which is a bit of a shame, since we’ve arranged for Kylene’s mom to bring the crib down Sunday. I’ve got a week left in October to finish painting and trim in the nursery. I think It’s safe to say I’ll be done by then… I hope. :-)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Home Improvement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.