Jenyfer Matthews

The bathroom is finished. Or as finished as it is going to be. I have to say that it was a more involved project than I expected it to be when I started it.

Let me start off by saying I’m not good at painting. In fact, this is probably the first room I’ve ever painted. There was one other time but it doesn’t really count – I was living at home still, going to college, when one day I decided I couldn’t stand the old, peeling wallpaper in my bathroom one more minute. Nevermind it was a rental house – I peeled all the paper down in about 15 minutes (it was that easy to get off) and painted the walls cream with some leftover paint we had from some other (now forgotten) project. Forget prepping the room or taping – I just painted right over any adhesive or dirt that was still on the wall. As I recall the bathroom looked better when I was done, but how could it not after the old wallpaper was gone?

At any rate, I tried to do things right this time around. I painted the ceiling first, then taped it off and did the cutting in with “wood violet” paint I used on the walls. In spite of having used my handy dandy cutting-in tool, the lines were hardly perfect when I was done, and I still managed to flick purple paint on the ceiling in a few places.

After the walls were done and I’d pulled the tape off, I decided to do what any sane person would do. I decided to touch up the ceiling paint first, then tried to touch up the cutting-in line with a 1/2″ stiff bristle artists brush.

The ceiling wasn’t hard to fix, but the cutting in line just got worse and worse.

The main problem is that the bathroom has been expanded and was a DIY project by the looks of it. The most problematic wall actually has a very rough and irregular join at the top of the wall and the ceiling – it actually looks a bit like it was cut with pinking shears. The only really good way to get a crisp line would be to add a bit of molding at the top of the wall (and don’t think I’m not scheming on doing that down the line) My sister told me it once took her two weeks to paint a bathroom because of the cutting-in line problem. For now I’m just going to tape the ceiling again and use my cutting-in tool on that wall again. But just the wall.

Since the other walls looked pretty good, I started to put the trim pieces back and of course noticed that they were looking very scruffy now. I think the person who installed them just bought plain white trim and installed them as is, unpainted. I washed them and gave them a coat of white paint. They look much better.

The whole room does.

It’s hard to get a true color in photos sometimes, but the name of this Glidden paint color is “Wood Violet” and though it is a bold color for the bathroom, I think it is a big improvement over the butterflies.

Seeing the difference that the paint made in this room makes me want to get busy painting my sewing room as well, but I have to take a short hiatus in home improvement projects. For one thing, I developed a couple of painful cracks in the thumb and index finger of my right hand. For another, I volunteered to host a female tennis player who is coming to compete in an upcoming professional tournament at our tennis club. It’s probably better to wait on pulling up the carpet on the stairs until after her stay!

Instead I will be cutting some fabric for a quilt for my daughter – also purple, ha ha! – and working on the candy wrapper decoupage end table for the downstairs kid zone. I never have a shortage of projects to work on…

Be Sociable, Share!

•