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painting the living & dining rooms
purple & green go together. yes they do. yes. they. do.
Right after Christmas
2002, I felt like I was going to lose my mind if I had to look at white
walls any longer.
Call it January blahs or
after-Christmas blues or winter doldrums, but I went on a rampage one
Saturday morning and dragged Sal with me to the paint store. We already
knew what colors we wanted in the living and dining rooms. We'd settled on
a dark plum treatment with an accent wall in the living room of sage
green. I know, it sounds horrible but it isn't, I swear.
We wanted to do a
treatment to the walls where you paint a base color and then you go over
the top with a different shade of the same color, stick plastic wrap to
it, and peel it off. It gives the surface a cool two-toned texture with
some depth. We'd actually done it to a bookcase and our bed frame and
entertainment center so we had a lot of practice with it. However, doing
the treatment to furniture is so not the same as doing it to a wall, let
alone two entire rooms.
The problem isn't so much
that it takes a lot of plastic (it doesn't) and doing the second top color
doesn't take a whole lot of paint since it gets diluted with water, but
since you can only do a one-foot square section at a time, it takes for-ever.
Plus, we have ten-foot ceilings so we had that much extra wall space to
cover...go up the ladder, balance a small container of paint mixed with
water, hold a paint brush in your teeth, tuck a roll of plastic wrap under
your arm, quickly paint a section, balance the container and paint brush
while trying to quickly pull out a length of plastic wrap, stick the
plastic to the wet paint, smooth it to get some good wrinkles in it
(that's what makes the effect), carefully peel the plastic off, try to
throw it in a garbage can under the ladder, move down a section, and start
all over again. Do as much as you can from the top of the ladder, climb
down, move the ladder (all while balancing your tools), do the rest of the
bottom section, climb the ladder to a new section of wall, and repeat the
process.
With all the woodwork in
both rooms, we spent a fair bit of time masking off everything.
Unfortunately, Mary Ann Clark hadn't been quite so diligent when she'd
painted the two rooms white, so the edges of all the trim -- especially
the molding along the ceiling -- have white paint on them. We spent a lot
of time trying to gently remove this but after two days of working on it
in the living room, you could hardly tell we'd done anything. We didn't
even bother doing it in the dining room because of that. At some point,
we're going to have to refinish the woodwork anyway so we'll worry about
it then. (The woodwork is in good shape, but there are places where
moisture has made the stain bubble and of course, nicks and such from
daily living.)
Sal painted both rooms and
the ceilings with the roller and then I followed doing the plastic wrap
treatment. When it came to the accent wall, the wall we'd chosen joined
with a purple wall in one corner, which required a little extra care doing
both walls. For one thing, the treatment itself is messy so trying to make
a nice, neat line without getting purple on the green wall or green on the
purple wall required luck, several do-overs, and not a little cussing.
Secondly, the corner where they met just happened to be the most
out-of-plumb wall in the entire house. So of course, that would be the one
we would choose to have the separate colors meet up and call attention to
it.
We fixed the problem by
snapping a chalk line down one wall and making that the "corner" where the
two colors met. That way, the real, whacked-out corner got painted dark
purple and now gives the illusion that it's just part of the wall. Pretty
ingenious, aye?
So anyway, it all turned
out. It was definitely the biggest project we'd tackled to that point and
we were both beat up by the end of it but the results.... Wow. Not to brag
or anything but both rooms turned out even better than expected. (NOTE:
The flash on the camera makes the two colors seem candy-colored...in
reality both the purple and green are a little duskier. Also, the rooms
appear a lot darker than they actually are. With the dark wood and dark
purple, it probably sounds like the rooms would be caves but they're not.)
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