So here is how that wall sat for months while we cavorted around Europe neglecting our house (although I did manage to clean up those paint scrapings on the floor, I'll have you know).
That wall will become one of the walls of my lovely new home office one day.
Here's another one of them.
And here's the other!
It's only a three-walled room at the moment until we get our act into gear and build a fourth wall to separate it from the rest of the sleepout (which will eventually become a verandah), but that doesn't have to stop us from making a start on the rest of the room!
First step? Get some more VJ boards (which are getting hard to find in the long lengths secondhand!), and fill in the last little bit of the old bathroom doorway.
And then scrape three layers of peeling paint off each of our new old boards. And so I scraped.
And scraped and scraped and scraped.
Until I was left with this. Actually I think I even had another go at them after this, because I'm terrified of them looking all splotchy and weird if I let some of the old paint stay.
And then came the wonderfully monotonous (but very necessary) step of sanding each of the walls, to make sure our undercoat would stick to them.
Here's Daniel taking on that job.
And then... ta da!!!!! How amazing does it look when the white undercoat starts covering up that dastardly yellow?
I don't think I've actually mentioned the strategy we've adopted for painting VJ walls before. See, VJs are really hard to paint with a nice big roller, because there's a groove between each of the boards. And try as you might, it's nigh impossible to get paint into every little inch of each groove with a roller. So, the only way to absolutely get full coverage is to go over each groove with a paintbrush before then following with a roller. At least that's what we've found.
I always get the joyous paintbrush job, while Daniel races me with the roller. And wins. Brushing is so much slower than rolling!
Once the undercoat was on, we left it for the obligatory two hours before beginning with our first coat of colour.
And what colour was it, you might wonder?
This was my fastest paint colour choice EVER. Remember the saga of deciding on a paint colour for the master bedroom ceiling? This was the opposite. Within about 30 seconds I had narrowed down my choice to two. Within another 10 seconds, I was decided! It's a miracle! And it's a grey too, which is HARD! Taubmans' Inverness is the winner.
As usual, we freaked out a bit as it went on because it looked so dark compared with the bright white undercoat.
But the more we painted, the more it won me over.
You can still see that it looks a bit patchy after the first coat.
Once the second coat was on it looked nice and smooth and pretty!
I'm so excited! One more step closer to having a home office! And perhaps more importantly, a few more square metres of that horrible yellow is gone! We'll get there eventually!
In the meantime, I may have to do something about the fact that the view to the fourth wall of the office looks like this. Hmm...
Grey is hard! We went through four different shades before we finally decided on Dulux Malay Grey. Some were too purple, too light, too dark, too blue.
ReplyDeleteI love your choice, very nice!
Sarah