Fun with Paint

As with any older house (15 years old), this one is not perfect. It is getting closer to perfection, thanks to my mom & I and a pile of cash, but it's a lot of work.

The guest bath, for example, was a fairly putrid blue when I moved in. Mom fixed that within the first days of moving in by painting it a cheerful, bright, sunny yellow. (She also replaced the nasty padded toilet seat cover. Do people actually use those things? They just feel so icky. Toilet seats should be hard and cool, not soft and warm. Yuck.)

Mom also took care of re-painting the laundry room a lovely sand color, and putting up a cute wallpaper border in there. It's cute, not icky, I swear. Anyway, that all happened before the washer/dryer/space shuttle arrived, so that's not today's project...

More recently, we have been attacking the master bathroom. It's a fairly large space, and somebody filled the walls with a busy 1980s Waverly sort of wallpaper. It's something that might work in a smaller space or as an accent on one wall of a bigger room, but egads, it was overwhelming in my poor master bath. So began project number 4: Wallpaper-be-gone.

If anybody out there is thinking about removing their own wallpaper, STOP. It took us the better part of a week to remove two walls of this very-well-stuck wallpaper using chemical wallpaper remover (bad idea) and finaly the old tried-and-true steamer. Bored with the process and facing quite a lot more wallpaper to remove, we decided to paint over the rest of it.

Mom found some magic primer that sticks to anything, including this coated wallpaper, to leave it water-wet so the latex paint sticks. Yesterday we put on the first coat of the real paint, and it will need one more coat to cover the stupid dark blue flowers of the wallpaper (grrr) and then we will rag-roll a coat of glaze on it. (More on that in a minute)

The last time I painted anything, I used a Wagner Power-Roller on a biiiig empty wall. Thus, painting was fun and sort of mindless. Fast-forward from then (~1983?) to now, painting a bathroom. The thing about bathrooms is that they are full of stuff you can't just paint over: mirrors, medicine cabinets, bathtub spouts, toilets, etc. Furthermore, this room has 13-foot ceilings and a large soffet, which means I'm up and down a big ladder much more than any monkey ever wanted to climb.

I've also managed to back into the paint at least once, and paint my hands, toes and arms a couple of times. In the competition for 'most body parts painted,' mom is running a close second; I have at least managed to keep it out of my hair...

That said, after one coat, I'm breathing a sigh of relief that the busy busy wallpaper is mostly disappeared. It's all worth it.

Next: The master bedroom. This one should go much faster. Famous last words, right?