Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Painting

benmartens Home Improvement

Before we moved in (and a little after moving in) we did a lot of painting. The living room, kitchen, family room, upstairs hallway, master bedroom, and master bedroom closet were all touched by the mad fury of paintbrushes and rollers. Thanks to everyone who helped out!

Some of these things might be obvious for those of you who paint a lot, but here are some things I learned that I figure I should remember for next time:

  • The computers at Home Depot do a great job of matching colors if you have the codes available. When you decide on a color, have them print off an extra code sticker and keep it safe so you can buy it again later.
  • The little $2 sample jars are great for touching up when you’re done.
  • The green Frog Tape is more expensive than the blue stuff, but it works amazingly well. I was unsure when we initially picked up our supplies, but after taking the tape off the first room, I was a believer.
  • If the four phases of painting are washing, taping, trimming and rolling, the distribution of work is about 20%, 35%, 35%, 10%. No matter how often I paint, I always seem to forget that the rolling is actually the quick part and by the time you get there, you’re almost done.
  • Unless you’re painting a small room, you can’t have too much help. Painting scales very well. If you have four people, you’ll get it done almost exactly twice as fast as if you did it yourself. It was amazing how long it took us to do little paint jobs after everyone left.
  • Radiused corners might look night but they are a pain to paint especially when you’re trying to stop a color at that corner.

Do you want to paint your house like ours? Here are the colors we used. White is the trim, gobi dessert is the “boring beige” on most of our walls, and shy violet is the color of the laundry room. I’m sure we’ll add more colors as time goes on, but it’s nice to have a small set of colors. The previous owners used a very slightly different shade in every room and left us ~40 cans of poorly marked paint in the garage.