painting teeny-tiny's room (part 1)

As I mentioned, we spent last weekend painting Teeny-Tiny's room. Having decided on fabric, we picked up some paint swatches to think about for the week, before buying anything.  We were debating between a super pale blue and pale gray and in the end, gray won out. We chose Martha Stewart's "Heavy Goose" because it's really pale and has some blue-ish undertones that will work nicely with the rest of the room. Our plan was actually to paint the room two colors, with gray on the bottom two-thirds of the wall and white at the top. To divide the colors, we are going to be adding a chair rail/picture ledge. 

Before painting we did all our prep work- moving everything out of the room or to the center and taping off all the windows and door frames. The taping was actually minimal because we didn't tape the baseboards or the ceiling. The baseboards are really ugly wood and already quite paint-splattered. Another project for this room is to add some chunky white baseboards, so it didn't matter if we got paint on the existing ones. As for the ceiling, we color matched the white of the ceiling to our wall color so we could paint right up to the ceiling without taping off. It's lucky we chose white for the top because those peaked ceilings would have been tricky, tricky to tape precisely. Nick also removed all the blinds and outlet covers (both of which we are switching out as well). 

Next we primed the whole room. We used Kilz Clean Start Latex Primer because it is a no-VOC primer, meaning low odor and no chemicals or gases are emitted. Important for both Baby and Mommy. We knew priming was a must, thanks to the dark khaki that covered the walls. Priming took much longer than the actual painting because the water-based primer didn't have perfect coverage and we ended up needing an extra can of primer three quarters of the way through the project. 

Luckily, the primer dried quickly and we were ready to add our gray to the wall. We also chose to have our paint mixed in a low-VOC option, so we used Glidden Low-VOC paint + primer.  We arbitrarily decided to make our color division at 60 inches so Nick measured and taped one wall for me. After cutting in along all the doors and windows, I rolled paint on the rest of the room. Since Nick had only taped one wall, I used this as my guide and eyeballed it for the rest of the room. Sixty inches is only slightly shorter than this little mama, so I knew that if I was painting above my head, I was going to high. We also weren't worried about a perfectly straight line, because the molding will cover the place where the two paints meet. This paint covered amazingly well. So well, in fact, that besides a few touch ups where we missed spots, we only needed one coat of paint for complete coverage. The distinction between the two parts of the wall is a little hard to see at the point, since the primer on the upper 1/3 of the wall is reading a gray, thanks to the khaki still showing through. Just imagine white in your head! 

You'll notice from the pictures that the walls look kind of shiny. When we asked to have the color mixed at Home Depot, we originally chose an eggshell finish for a more matte look. However, unbeknownst to us, the guy behind the counter mixed a semi-gloss can for us. Not exactly what we wanted but not enough of a problem for us to consider repainting. Besides, as Nick put it, the walls will be easier to clean should "anything" ever need to be cleaned off the walls ... 

This is the part where I tell you that we finished up painting the rest of the room the next day, but alas no. This is as far as we got last weekend. As I mentioned in this post, my endurance for big projects isn't quite what it used to be. So this ideally one-weekend project has turned into a two-weekender.