Once the plastering was finished, it was on to painting. After years of living in rental apartments with sterile white walls, we were determined to fill our surroundings with rich color. So what if the dark tones would make our rooms seem smaller? Better cozy and colorful than big and bland.
Again we were under a time crunch. We had a little over a week to paint the living room, dining room and hallway before we were scheduled to have the wood floors in those rooms refinished. (The floor refinishing will be the subject of a future post.)
Between the two of us, my husband and I had minimal painting experience. My husband had never painted before. While in college I'd spent two summers painting industrial buildings at Kodak, but that didn't qualify me as an interior home painter. Again, we were fortunate to have the help of my father.
While we waited for my father's arrival, my husband and I decided to hone our painting skills by priming the living room. Why we decided to start with the largest room in the apartment, I don't know. After applying a coat of primer, we could still see the pencil marks the electrician had made and the patches made by the plasterer. We applied two more coats before we realized that the paint store had given us the wrong type of primer--one that wasn't known for its coverage ability. After purchasing what we thought was the right primer, we then discovered that we needed a tinted primer for the dark colors we'd chosen. So it was back to the paint store again.
Once my father arrived things began to go more smoothly. (That is after my father spent a couple of days smoothing out the patches Best Wall Plastering failed to finish properly. See If These Walls Could Talk.) In one week the three of us were able to paint the walls in the living room, dining room, kitchen and bathroom. We were only able to prime the hallway before our deadline, which actually turned out to be a positive. I changed my mind about the wall color at the last minute and the walls would sustain many scrapes and scratches from the work to be done in the coming weeks.
So here are the results of our hard labor (I apologize for the poor picture quality. Blame the bad camera on the Treo 755. My good camera was packed away. I've included color swatches to provide a better idea of the color):
Living Room Before:
Living Room After:
Benjamin Moore Audubon Russet:
Dining Room Before:
Dining Room After:
Benjamin Moore Hot Apple Spice:
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