Painting the Dining Room

While the husbands away…I always tackle a project. This way he can’t say no!

Typically it takes a couple of weeks of prep work before he accepts a project and he never believes that it will look good in the end. Doing it while is gone means he can’t say no, can’t complain about the mess and can’t give me that look like “that could never possibly look good even though you are trained as a designer you are wrong”. He always walks back into the house after a trip somewhat hesitantly.

When we bought the house, I did not want to commit to colours for every room before moving in, but we still wanted to paint the 2 sitting rooms and the dining room before the furniture was in. So the dining room ended up white, just straight up out of the can white. Here is what it what the room looks like…kinda boring.

So to jazz it up I initially was going to run a boarder of wallpaper horizontally around the room at chair rail height. All the wallpapers in the home improvement stores were too b

old or not the right style of pattern, I knew I would get sick of them quickly. I wanted something soft and graphic; I like straight lines and geometric shapes. So I got out my tape and paint brush and got too it. The colour is one shade darker than the front hall.

I love it, it adds some personality to the room.

And now we know: creating this kind of pattern was much less painful than expected. Once the initial measuring was done (fun, I like rulers!), it was only half an hour each evening to put on 4 coats of paint, 2 white, 2 cream. And there was no leaking of paint under the tape, so no touch ups!

Painting the Bathroom

After finishing the major work on the bathroom, the next step was painting. By now I was a little sick of spending hours on end in the bathroom during a heat wave with only a tiny window for air. Over a couple of evenings after work I put 2 coats on…and the results were so-so at best. It seemed more baby blue than the light barely there grey-blue I wanted.

After living with it for a while and installing the accessories that cover some of the colour, it has grown on me. A friend also pointed out that it will look better once the trim and door are painted white as opposed to the current yellowed-white.

And now we know: get paintable caulking, otherwise if the edge of your paint gets on the caulking and pieces will peel off.