It's A Pain To Paint

On our 3rd day in the house, we started what we thought would be a short paint project. Since priming went rather quickly, we thought painting the walls would also be a task we could instantly check off our to-do list. However, a series of miscalculations proved we were too hasty in our judgement.

We picked the colors for the rooms but made a rookie mistake. We rushed to get paint colors (Pittsburgh Paints - Grand Distinction in Eggshell sheen) but neglected to look at them under different lights so we could see how the colors changed with various light sources. M and I didn't want to buy samples so we picked what looked like a gray blue (chambray) and a tan (Arizona sand) only to end up with a very blue living room and a peachy orange dining room. M and I were initially disappointed with the outcome but the colors have slowly grown on us and we're hoping the rooms will look much better once we move our furnishings into the house.

Second rookie mistake was that, since my parents were visiting, we both rushed to paint the rooms with little to no light source. We took the light/fan fixture off the ceiling so I had very little light to work with in our west-facing living room. The issue with this was that, though the paint looked uniformed when wet, it dried and revealed my streaky uneven painting which meant I had to do a second coat.

The streaky painting was also attributed to our third rookie mistake: buying the wrong type of paint rollers. Apparently roller thickness matters! M and I thought our walls were a smooth/semi-smooth texture and bought rollers accordingly, but what we needed was a roller to do a semi-smooth/semi-rough walls so that the roller fuzz was thick enough to get into the crevices in the wall. We made a second trip to the store to buy new rollers before I did my second coat in the living room. To make matters worse, upon closer inspection, the ceilings didn't look the best so we decided to also paint them, making our third day in the house full of exasperated sighs.

First coat of paint in the living room

Living room

Primed then painted the ceilings but didn't do edging

M painted the edging first in the dining room. The color is more subdued in pictures.

Edging

Second coat of paint!

M's systematic and methodical painting skills

Almost finished