Oh, We're Painting the Drywall White... (Updated)

I like to paint rooms. Actually I like doing any chore that involves making big, obvious changes to my environment. Mowing the lawn, staining a piece of furniture, or planting a garden are good examples of this. Unfortunately, a terrible example of this is the painting job I did this weekend.


Over the years the walls have gotten a bit dingy and I needed to repair a gouge in the drywall anyway so I spent some of Saturday painting the hallway and living room.

There is a lot of exposed wood in the place which makes the house look, well, homey, but this limits the shades that can be used. We went with darkish colors for the bedrooms and light blue for the kid’s room but these areas are isolated and therefore look cozy in those hues. An area the size and shape of the hallway/living room needs something a lot lighter or else you risk turning your whole house into a dark cave (it was like that when we first moved in).

The Valspar eggshell paint we chose was called, according to the card, Pale Ivory (114-2). A light color, but obviously not straight-up white which we felt would have been stark and cold. It looked great on the color card at Lowe’s and on the little paint dot on the can lid. In my opinion, however, Valspar’s fancy-pants name for the paint should be re-named “Dingy Drywall White” for all the effect it had on the place.

Other than a very slight wet look, I really had no visual cue on where I started and where I stopped painting. Oh, there were the occasional scuff marks and dirty areas that cleaned up nice with a fresh coat of paint but other than that I don’t see what the point of my 4-hour task was.

I only ended up putting on one coat. I mean, why would I do anything else? All I would be doing by slapping a second coat on is wasting a paint roller, slightly increasing the odds that I would screw something up (spill the paint, paint the trim, etc.) and greatly increasing the odds that I would be sore from stooping and stretching for several more hours. Plus I had no desire to hear myself do the “fat guy grunt” any more that day. You know what I’m talking about. I’m workin’ on it. Leave me alone.

To say I only put on one coat is probably not accurate. I am sure in some places I put between 2 and 5 coats because I had no idea if I had done that area yet. Maybe there are some ways of determining starting and stopping points but “using reflected light along with the gift of vision” is not one of them.

So I removed the 12.6 miles of painter’s tape from the all the fiddly bits of the doorways and exposed ceiling joists and upstairs railing and called it “done”.

There are some positives that have come out of this ho-hum project: 1) I have an extra gallon of the paint sitting in my garage that a friend of mine might be able to use in his new house 2) I was worried that the new paint / old paint border where the kitchen meets the living room would look weird. No worries there. 3) I got to try a tape-removal technique that a friend recommended (worked out great) and 4) My 15-month-old now knows the words “tape” and “sticky” and is familiar with the phrases “Yes, the tape is blue” and “Hey-hey-hey-stop-stop-don’t-pull-the-tape-awwww-dude-that’s-not-funny”.

SnowUrchin Note (11/03/09):  It has come to my attention that some people might think I am unhappy with the actual paint I chose for this project.  That is not true whatsoever.  I am, however, less than proud of my ability to recognize that a paint color card I pick up at Lowe's is the precise shade of the walls of a house I have lived in for the better part of a decade. :)