Watching Paint Dry

My plan was to post this last Monday, since it occurred last weekend. But things weren't happening as planned so here it is today. And as the name implies, it may be a bit boring.

It's been probably ten years since we painted the living room and it was in desperate need of a new paint job. I always liked the color I painted it the last time. It was Olympic paint's "Belgian Waffle". We don't have high ceilings and I didn't want anything that would make the room seem darker. The neutralness (is that a word?) of the creamy soft yellow brightened and made the room seem cheerier. And I love that yummy name!

But it was time to move on and do a little updating. Last summer I repainted our bedroom and made it into bold horizontal stripes. That made the room seem much bigger. Of course moving all the workout equipment out (finally!) helped there too.

For the living room I wanted to stay in the tan colors and I decided to do this one wall in vertical stripes (which would help give the illusion of a taller ceiling). After all, the bedroom's horizontal stripes had come out nicely and vertical stripes would be easier, I thought.

In this picture you can see where I had to put a patch on the wall to cover a hole. A rather large hole. This happened a few months ago when we left our son at home alone while we went on a little weekend overnighter. When we returned we found a rather large hole in the wall. The explanation was that he'd had some friends over and they got to tussling around and one of them missed the other and punched the wall instead. Hmmmmm.

I went to a few home improvement places and picked up a few paint chips. Just a few. At the top are the two chosen colors, Olympic's "Mountain Trail" and "Pony Tail". Even the names go together!

The first thing I did was remove everything from the walls and patched everything that needed patching: cracks and nail holes.

I learned from doing the bedroom stripes that you are supposed to paint the entire wall the lighter color first. Here I've done all the edges and painted a layer over the patches.

Then the entire wall is painted with the lighter color.

In the morning it became obvious that I needed a second coat so I quickly gave the wall another once over. At that point Carli came over to help so we went to lunch first. When we returned several hours had past since I had painted the second coat so I figured it was ready for the taping.

We decided to make the dark stripes bigger than the light stripes. The dark stripes are 8" wide and the light stripes are 4". I first made little measuring dots on the wall with my ruler and a pencil, then used a level to make straight lines. We put the tape in what would be the light stripes and then painted the dark color on the wall.

Now is the part where I got confused. I always thought you aren't supposed to wait until the paint is totally dry before you pull the paint off. That's because if you paint over the tape and it dries when the tape is pulled off, the paint might come with it, which has indeed happened to me before. So in this instance I waited about thirty minutes and began to pull the tape off. In this picture you can see where in most cases the paint underneath the tape came off with the tape straight to the previous color, or in some instances the patch spackle.

I know the spackle was dry because that main hole had been done a few weeks ago. The only thing I can think of why it did that is maybe I should have waited another entire day after applying the second coat of light paint. Then put the tape on and continue.

But in the end I repaired the missing spots by carefully hand painting them in.

Don't worry, I'm not going to do the entire living room like this. I think that would make it too busy. The rest of the walls will be painted in the lighter color.

Eventually.