Will it Never End?

I could be referring to many many things.

This renovation? My blogging incessantly about it?

I think the safe answer to those two questions would be no. This renovation will never end, and I'm going to persist with this blogging thing as long as I can! You're stuck with me!

But I digress. The matter at hand is actually the internal painting downstairs. I feel like I've been painting those rooms for decades now! Can it only be months? That's still a long time, right? It's not just me?

Well let me tell you. I have a new sympathy for the painting profession. It's not difficult. Once you get the hang of it it's actually pretty easy. But there is SO. MUCH. TO. PAINT!!!!

And I've said it before, I'll say it again. The whole undercoat, first coat, final coat procedure has to be one of the most demoralising things ever. Not only do you have to do the job once, you have to do it THREE times before it can even be considered remotely finished! Isn't the definition of insanity something along the lines of doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result?

Well that explains a lot, then.

Fortunately for you, you get to look back on those days and days and days of pain and just admire the pretty pictures.

Here we go!

I present the first of the single car garages, all plastered and battened up.

And the second!

The agreement with the painters we hired to paint the outside of the house was that they would paint only the outside perimeter... so the weatherboards in the above shot and the front side of the battens on the front wall of the garage were their territory, but we had to do the rest.

So, while the plasterers were still tidying up their bits and pieces inside, Daniel and I got to work undercoating all of those battens (not a fun task at the best of times, let me tell you! Painting the sides of battens is torture)...

And then, you guessed it! Two more coats! We chose to use up the tin of Gunnard Grey that we painted the front stairs with, thinking we would paint the whole house in that colour. Walls, ceiling, cornice, everything. Keeping it simple, folks! Unfortunately my brilliant plan to use up otherwise un-useable paint backfired slightly, since we ran out of that colour before we were quite finished, meaning I then had to go out and buy more of it. Drat.

 
So then we moved inside.

We painted most of the walls in Dulux's Dieskau, a lovely, soft but vaguely warm-ish light grey. But I painted the window-less wall in the lounge room a darker shade of grey than the rest of the internal walls, Dulux Flooded Gum, actually, which is the same colour we painted the master bedroom and most of the outside of the house!

Cutting in carefully around the ceiling beams of course (which you can see in this picture needed some more touching up with ceiling paint to get a consistent colour)...

And I continued that darker colour all the way across that wall, past the door leading to the garage...

And around into the hallway, so the little triangular niche cutout in the wall in the hallway is in the darker colour.

You can see the different shades of grey on both sides of the hallway in this shot.

It sounds like it might be a bit strange in person having a different colour on each side of the hallway, but there's actually very little exposed wall on the left side, because it's all taken up with linen closet. I think it has turned out very well.

On the topic of closets, and in the same spirit of using-up-paint-colours-we-don't-need, I decided that for the wardrobes and cupboards we should use the giant tin of Sandy Day Half strength Solver paint that we had originally bought, thinking we would paint all of the downstairs walls in that colour. Before we realised that it looked pink.

It still looks a little bit pink-ish, but it's really not too bad, and on the inside of a wardrobe, who cares?

I think it's kind of nice having a slightly warmer colour in the robes.

But that's not the full story. I was so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of all the painting we still had to do that I was not coping. So, what do I do when I'm not coping? I write a list.

Yep, this is pretty much my motto.

Source

But this was no ordinary list-making situation. I felt the need to write FIVE lists, and bulldog clip them to the curtain by the front door upstairs. What can I say? I'm a control freak, I was overwhelmed, and I'm not happy in my sense of accomplishment completing a task unless I can cross it off a to-do list!

And just because this is so much fun, how about some close-ups of my lists?

Insanity. I'll leave it up to you to decide if it's the volume of painting still remaining or myself that I'm referring to there.

This bathroom doorway is a prime example of the puttying required. Every single seam, every single nail hole. Woe is me.

But the doors are what got me. Every single door needed a couple of coats of gloss. And it takes a long time to paint a door with all of those grooves! I knew that from my time painting the wardrobe doors upstairs.

So, every single door got a couple of coats of gloss.

Painting all of the trim in situ was so painful that we even tried to get a head start on any remaining trim and skirting board pieces that were yet to go up by undercoating every piece of timber in sight that we thought might be used, to try to save some time and effort 

 

But even then, I still ended up spending the good part of an entire weekend sitting on my toosh painting the skirting boards once they were installed.

I can't show you those though, because that would give away too many secrets of what else happened in the meantime! We're nearly at finishing touches time people, and I could not be more happy about it!

Now can someone suggest how I can remove this paintbrush that is now fused to my hand?