Painting the TV Room

Doesn’t look like much but these were all over the walls in the corner from a puppet house we had. It was original builder’s paint and even the finger smudges around the lightswitch wouldn’t wash!

I’m going to paint today!

I woke up the other morning and decided that I wanted to paint our TV Room. Nesting? Perhaps. I had won a gift certificate a while back to Splash Wall Art. I purchased some wall designs for the boys room but also two train decals for above the train table in the TV room. I didn’t want to put them up with walls that were covered with marks and had annoying dirty smudges that wouldn’t wash off.

A while ago a friend had given us a few cans of paint left over from their own paint job so really, all that was needed was my time and energy!

Painting in a few easy steps:

• Move furniture out of room, or at least away from the wall.
• Vacuum floor and use a microfiber cloth on the baseboards.
• Remove switch plates.
• If you are a bad painter, like I fear I am, use painter’s tape. Just line the baseboards, ceiling and around doorways and frames.
• Put a drop sheet {old sheets, towels…whatever} down where you will be working to catch splatters.
• Open your paint can and use a brush and light stroke, paint the edges around the room along the painters tape.
• Then use a roller and working in small strokes, do a little patch of wall at a time. {My friend can paint using the extender in an floor to ceiling stroke without effort. When I tried this, attaching the roller to a broom handle, paint seemed to splatter everywhere. I think it takes a more experienced painter to master broad strokes}.
• If you have the energy, you can do a second coat. I didn’t have any more energy by the time I finished, so I inspected my work carefully in the sunlight and rollered over any spots that I missed the first time round.

The littles join in!

You can not imagine their delight when they were allowed to paint a small area themselves. They love to help and be involved. John did get “fired” when he began to try and paint outside his designated realm though. He didn’t seem to mind too much. He’d had his fun.

It looks like a pretty light color but it actually is much darker than the original wall as you can see in this picture below. I’m quite happy with it and as soon as the paint sets (about 2 week), I then will put up the train decals for the wall.

You can do it too!

So I want to encourage you, if you’ve never painted before, that it isn’t that hard. It’s a lot of work and requires energy but not any special talent because I did it and I don’t have any talent in that area at all. That being said, if you are going to paint your room yourself, you need to be kind to yourself. I can see where I made a few mistakes, some paint sneaked past the tape and I touched the ceiling in a few small spots. Only I notice these insignificant “oopsies”. When others look into the room, they do not see these little imperfections.

Have you ever painted? How’d it go? If not, why not?

• This post is linked to Works for Me Wednesday and Transformation Thursday.
• On a high from my success, I’m going to paint my bedroom next!!