that brown house

while eric painted two more coats of paint in the kitchen on saturday and primed the laundry room on sunday, i spend endless hours in the bathroom priming and painting the wood wainscot. i kept hazily recalling the karate kid and “wax on, wax off” unfortunately, i don’t remember the catch phrase for the scene where daniel is painting the fence. painting the beaded plywood requires a surprising amount of attention to detail (surprising only because it’s all going to be one color) to get enough coverage without having the paint pool in the beaded ridges or look gloppy on the trim. eric speed things along saturday evening by helping with some of the priming — he seems to be able to cover twice as much ground in half as much time and without his help i’d probably have only made it halfway around the room — however, i’m really proud of the wall i took my time on; i think it’s one of the first things we’ve accomplished that looks as good as i would expect from a professional.

there is hope that the rest of the painting projects will still come out wonderfully too. the kitchen walls no longer look like they were colored with a giant green highlighter. after three coats, the “overt green” (apple green) now matches the paint sample. it’s not a subtle color choice by any stretch of the imagination, but eric and i still agree that in combination with the white casework and appliances it’ll make the kitchen cheerful and fun…and that’s exactly what i need to placate myself until we can afford to address the kitchen’s other shortcomings.

we’re also really pleased with the dining room color selection. “poolhouse” is a deep blue-gray that contrasts beautifully with the white woodwork. we still have many many hours of touch-ups to do in there. to “get the house ready to go on the market” the sellers’ real estate agent had a painter in to paint, well, everything and it seems that very little prep work went into that paint job. the painter’s tape pulled jagged patches of that paint off the box beams and there are random chips flaking off everywhere. bleh. anyway, we eventually want to strip away the white paint in the dining room, so we don’t want to be spending too much time and adding too much more paint to the woodwork. it will most likely be a few years before we get to the wood-stripping project, so it looks like next weekend will include many hours on the ladder doing touch-up work in the dining room.