Here it is before we started attacking that room. You only get the tinest of tiny glimpses of it here in the top left, but it does show the relationship it had with the yellow walls. Yuck.
And here it is again when we were using the room for storage while we redid the floors.
Basically, it was white, the same as all the other ceilings in the house (were). The paint was in reasonably good condition, but it's still probably been many years since it was painted, so we had to paint it it. The question was, what colour?
Watch out folks, once you pop you can't stop! I couldn't resist the temptation to go with something other than white.
Don't worry, I'm sticking with fairly failsafe not-too-risky options, so I haven't gone crazy and decided to do this:
But I did happily drag Daniel down to Bunnings with me with our three different tiles for the bathroom and hold up paint chips against them. That was quite an experience, actually. My previous colour choices at Solver were made using those little booklets, which are not only tiny, but they're generally behind the counter in the custody of one of the staff, so I was never left to my own devices to experiment and take my time and make up my own mind. I would have had to hurt their feelings by asking them to leave me alone for a while to get a bit of paint chip privacy. While I imagine some people might like having a professional to give them guidance, I prefer being on my own and not feeling pressured into making a decision because they're getting fed up with my indecision.
So, I loved trialing a whole bunch of different colours (and brands) against the tiles at my leisure. It was amazing to me finding that virtually every colour I picked up in a certain brand looked horribly sick and yellow against our main tile, while every colour I picked up in another brand (Taubmans) looked like it worked. Who woulda thunk!
I developed a little shortlist, and lined them all up on top of the main tile (everything goes with the other two tiles - they're black).
Just out of interest, here they all are against one of our white doors. Look at how much darker they all seem against white, even factoring in the difference in lighting!
So. Which one did I choose?
The big one, called Grey Fog (inspiring name, huh?). It looked like almost exactly the same colour as the main tile, just a fraction darker. Knowing what I now know about how colours always look darker on a ceiling, I figured that was probably as dark as I needed to go to make it clear that it wasn't just plain white. Especially considering that the ceiling in the bathroom slopes down a lot, so the last thing I want is for the room to feel oppressive if I put too dark a colour up there. Plus, we're tiling a whole wall in black pinstripe tiles, so we probably don't need much more dark colour drama in that room.
I bought a wall paint because ceiling paints don't tend to come with whatever magical components they add to protect against mould, and I'd really rather not have issues cleaning the ceiling if I need to. I only bought 1 litre to do two coats on the 6 square metre ceiling, but as it turned out later, that wasn't enough so I had to buy yet another 1 litre can. Not very good value for money! I suggest going for more than you think you'll need, particularly when you're likely to have other rooms you can paint in the same colour (like we can the laundry and ensuite in the future).
Decision made, I got to work painting.
And I freaked out. Rather than looking like a pleasant grey-ish cream, it looked icky and yellowy and kind of horrible after the first coat. Now I think about it, that probably had a lot to do with all of the yellow walls that still remained - they probably reflected a fair bit of colour back onto the ceiling, particularly when it was still wet and only a thin coating.
I spent a fair bit of time in my favourite ceiling-viewing position, assessing it.
By the way, that white strip running down the centre was where we'd had to rip out the wire for the existing light in that room. Because it's almost impossible to get into the ceiling above the bathroom, all of the wiring is run on the inside of the room itself - very attractive. Anyway, we forgot about that light until I was already part way through painting the ceiling, so I had to leave that strip bare to allow for sanding down the rough edges and filling the holes the wiring left behind, before painting.
We ended up giving the ceiling three coats, just to be on the safe side, and we're really pleased with how it's turned out. Here's the view from the sleep-out before we sealed that wall.
Just you wait to see what it will look like with the tiles! Heaven!
I might just make you wait for a big reveal. That totally has everything to do with wanting to keep the mystery alive, and nothing to do with the fact that I may or may not have lost some photos of it.
Now really truly, my next post will be about the tiling happening! I promise!
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