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The room has mostly been used for storage, and occasionally as a guest room. Katy's friend Sue helped to pick out the border and colors to use, and Katy drew up a plan to figure out how much paint and supplies to buy and what furniture would fit in the completed room.
Here's the layout of the room before starting the project:
| Southeast corner |  |
| Northeast corner |  |
| Northwest corner |  |
| Southwest corner |  |
Before we could start to paint, we removed all of the switch plates and
furnace vents.
This was not as easy as you might expect, since the furnace vents were
painted in place. What were they thinking when they painted this room the last time?
They must have been in a hurry.
Meanwhile, everything that was in the room was removed to the nearest convenient
space, the living room (the bed did make it to the basement).
We start from the top down. Rich worked on cutting in around the edge of the
ceiling.
Soon after this, we decided that repainting the room was Katy's project.
Katy continues to work on the ceiling.
I've decided that I am not fond of textured ceilings. They're hard to repair and paint, and seem to attract cobwebs. And they take at least twice as much paint as you expect. We used almost two full gallons of ceiling white before we were done painting, and this is a pretty small room.
Sue was kind enough to help out with painting the ceiling and the top half of
the walls. We've chosen a butter yellow for this part of the wall.
We used more paint than we expected, since it went on very thinly. I'm not planning on buying America's Choice brand from Home Depot again. Saving a couple of bucks a gallon doesn't seem worth it in retrospect -- especially since we'd put on three coats, and I started to worry that we would run out of paint before the walls were well covered.
The bottom half of the walls is painted in royal blue. Just getting started
here, we cut in around the edges.
And done with the blue paint! Hooray!
The blue paint was much thicker and covered better than the yellow paint, so I was less worried about moving on to the trim.
Unfortunately, the trim paint was even worse than the yellow paint, which managed to cover pretty well after three coats. It went on very thinly at first, and I decided I should start with a primer coat. So the first attempt (just a doorway) was wiped off and Ginny and I primed the trim.
I went on to work on the rest of the trim. Everything started out OK.
But after letting the second coat dry, things still looked streaky.
I ended up putting on four coats of trim paint before even getting to the windows. Since I'd only purchased a quart of paint, I knew I wouldn't have enough left. So I purchased a different brand of paint from a Sherwin Williams, and used that to finish up the trim. It still took two more coats before it looked right. I never want to paint trim again.
The windows went fairly quickly. I followed instructions from the Readers
Digest New Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual about painting
double-hung windows without painting them shut.
It worked great.
I got some help from my father to put up the border. It made a huge
difference in how finished the room looks.
My parents were kind enough to give us a carpet and a rocking chair. It's
starting to look like a finished room, now!
