Painting a Room – Tips and Tricks
By Alina Avery
As I said, a lot has happened in the past year, including a big life change for us: Matt and I closed on the purchase of our first home!
It was a tedious process, and it took a while for us to find the right place and then have an offer accepted, but we’ve been living in the new digs for a few weeks and absolutely LOVING it. It’s such a different feeling to live in a space that you own rather than rent, and we’re finding ourselves taking a lot more care in maintaining, decorating, organizing, and settling in than we previously have.
We didn’t move in right away though, because we wanted to repaint some rooms first while they were empty, which turned out to be much more effort and much more of a production than we anticipated. I scourged the internet for helpful tips for repainting and honestly, didn’t find anything super novel, but they say there’s no better way to learn than by doing, so do we did and here’s what we learned:
- When choosing your paint colors, consider the floors. We have gorgeous hardwood floors and we decided we’d want to refinish them eventually, but it was outside the scope of our current level of handiness. So we left the floor as-is and chose a paint color by swatching it in the middle of the wall while the floors were covered with a drop cloth. Turns out, the super warm tone of the floors reflects onto the paint color and make it look a LOT cooler than we imagined. Our creamy white looked almost baby blue and our stone gray looked overly purple. After a minute of freaking out, I decided we’re not going to repaint AGAIN, so we’ll fix it with lighting and furniture. It’s turned out looking great with the warmest toned lightbulbs we could find and some cool toned curtains and furniture to “steal the blue” from the walls, but it would have been a lot less effort to pick a warmer paint color that would look more neutral when paired with our warm floors.
- **Buy these lid covers with spouts for your paint cans. **It’s a really minimal investment and it’s going to make your paint pouring so much easier, especially if you’re pouring into a trim cup (also a good idea to buy, but we used red solo cups (#college) and it turned out just fine). If you’re doing a small space over multiple days, this is a super handy purchase. Shout out to my mom who suggested this, which my husband scoffed at, but then admitted it was a game changer.
- Don’t wait too long to clean your brushes. This one might be obvious, but I read a bunch of tips on how to preserve your brush between sessions by wrapping it in cling wrap, but I seem to have taken it too far. Once we got the walls done, we took our time painting the trim over a few days. Since I was using the same paint for all of the trim, I followed the aforementioned tip and just wrapped up the brush overnight. This was fine for the first day or two, but after 5 days (I’m a slow painter!) the eventual brush cleaning was a nightmare. It’s a lot easier to just wash and dry the brush in between than to wait too long and regret it.
- **Paint barefoot. **I know this sounds weird, but if you’re wearing shoes and drip paint on the floor and step in it, you might not notice right away and then track paint around the house if you leave the room. If you’re barefoot, you’ll definitely notice if you step in some wet paint and be a lot more cognizant of leaving paint-y footprints everywhere.
We intended to paint the whole apartment, but after two rooms and a hallway, we decided to take a break. Next we’ll take on the foyer and the kitchen so perhaps I’ll have more painting tips for you soon!
