Painting the 2nd Bedroom

In preparation for our house guest, the 2^nd bedroom finally got a coat of paint. Here it is before we moved in, before it became a dumping ground for our dressers, file cabinet and clothes drying rack.

And here it is with a fresh coat of white and grey paint. I have been a long time buyer of CIL paint (I am cheap like that) and have never had a problem with it in 3 years, but this time it was terrible. A ½ litre can only covered ½ of one coat of the top half of the room, which is white. And it covered crappily even though it was going over a slightly greyed white. I had a similar problem with the CIL bathroom paint, which was supposed to be a premium mold resistant formula. It went on streaky even with 2 coats, but I had chalked that one up to painting quickly and in the heat. After 2 poor results, I am switching to Behr, which went on perfectly for the rest of the bedroom.

In this case the painters tape between the 2 colours did not work well. There was a lot of bleeding of the grey and the edges around the entire room. Same tape as the dining room, maybe I didn’t press as hard this time? Not sure.

And now we know: a small can does not cover much, even if the Home Depot employee says it will be enough for 2 coats.

Patching the Second Bedroom (1st time) & the Kitchen Ceiling (3rd time)

We are expecting a friend to stay with us for the August 20^th weekend. So for that to happen we needed to have a guest room with a bed and walls that did not have a section made of garbage bags.

While doing that I figured I might as well patch the kitchen ceiling for the 3^rd time. Not that the hole wasn’t a nice focal point.

The bedroom was painless. We have learnt that to match the thickness of the plaster it is best to use a ¼” sheet of drywall and a ½” sheet of drywall stacked, Then you do not need to put on 500 coats of mud trying to make up ¼” of thickness.

The kitchen started out well, I measured the drywall and marked the location of all the studs. My husband came to hold it in place while I screwed in the corners. That’s when the water started pouring out of the gap between the new and the old. We quickly took the new piece down and looked into the familiar hole. I had screwed through a supply pipe. The only drywall screws we had left were 3” and I managed to hit the only pipe within the area. Seriously the pipe is about 1” by 4” and the whole is about 36”x48”. Sucks.

My husband was very, very angry. He went and bought that magic putty stuff and patched the hole. We went to dinner and came home to a stream of water. Weighing our options we decided having running water outweighed the potential cost of an emergency plumber visit. Turned out that even thought it was 8pm on a Saturday night, the plumber happened to be working in the neighbourhood. He arrived in 15 minutes, replaced the section of pipe in another 15 and didn’t charge because “we are such good customers and have had such a rough year”. Awesome plumber!

I have since re-installed the drywall and put a coat of mud on without issue. It really makes the room brighter; there is more white ceiling for the light to bounce off of.

And now we know: everyone makes mistakes it is a part of life, you have to laugh when something like this happens.