The first rule of painting a room is: Cover the floor. Your superpower is not painting without drippage. You will drip. Even if you could be as careful as you think you are, nobody has the intensity to be that careful for the hours and hours it takes to paint a room. You are going to drip. A lot. Cover the floor.
And I know I said this before, but it bears repeating: There’s a reason that some paint costs ten bucks a gallon and some costs forty dollars a gallon. If you go for the cheap stuff, you’ll have to slap on four times as much paint. You don’t think you will. You think you can lay it on thick enough the first time that it will cover any color, even traffic orange, but you’re wrong. Put a crowbar in your wallet and buy the expensive stuff. You can’t go wrong with that, but you can go way wrong with the cheap stuff.
Our bathroom used to have bright blue walls but the paint faded and grew splotchy in places. We’ve been thinking about painting it, which means that My Darling B was thinking about it and I was going to do it. Well, about two weeks ago I finally got up the motivation to schlep my hinder down to the hardware store to buy a can of paint. That’s when I bought the cheap paint. I slapped on two coats of that crap as thick as I could lay it down but the blue paint underneath still proudly showed through, bright as a neon sign.
So last week I schlepped myself down to the hardware store again to buy a bucket of the most expensive interior paint they had in stock. Easier said than done. There was no one at the desk when I got there and, no matter how long I hung around looking impatient, there continued to be nobody at the desk. Eventually I headed down the aisle to the desk where they sold window blinds to ask the guy there if he thought he could find someone to help me out in the paint department. He put a call out over the PA. Five minutes passed. Another member of the “Customer Courtesy Team” wandered past and asked me if I was being helped. “Not yet,” I answered, with what I hoped was a patient smile on my face. Another page went out over the PA, and several more minutes passed.
Finally, a gal identified by her badge as Katie P dragged herself in behind the desk. “Help you,” she sort of asked. Her attitude was Surly Teenager but she appeared to be a nearly full-grown adult. I pushed the bucket of paint I had across the desk toward her and handed over the paint chip I’d picked out. She took the bucket and the chip from me without a word, mixed the paint and stuck it in the paint shaker, then went to help the next person. She literally never spoke to me after those first two words. And yes, she was wearing a blue “Customer Courtesy Team” vest.
Back at home I scrounged a pan and a paint roller out of the stack of supplies in the garage. There’s a reason we keep this stuff, although I could tell from the color of the residual paint in the pan that I hadn’t used it since about 1997 or 98 when I painted the interior of our bedroom in the last house we owned in Aurora, Colorado. I still miss that house.
The expensive paint didn’t cover the bright blue paint in one coat. By this time I was pretty sure that a bucket of black driveway sealer wouldn’t do that. But it looked a hell of a lot better than the cheap stuff, and after the second coat went on the walls were pretty enough for company again. I have an “after” photo but I can’t figure out how to get it off my camera, so you’ll just have to imagine our bathroom with walls painted beautifully in antique white.
I’ll tell you the story about the furshlugginer camera later.