paint my apartment

Even though my boyfriend did most of the work and I only helped, I’m completely exhausted. Sure, painting is not that hard, but all the preparation is awful and takes forever! We had a lot of holes and cracks to repair with spackle, then we had to sand them, then it was another round of spackling and sanding (for some holes we had three rounds of this process!), then cleaning the walls (lots of grime and dust), painting with the primer, painting the first coat, realizing it’s not enough and painting the second coat and finally, the “best” part of it all, cleaning the whole place about ten zillion times because it’s like a sandstorm went through with all the dust from the sanding. Oh yeah, and there were two shopping runs when some of our tools broke and we couldn’t go on. Did I mention we lived on pizza and fast food delivered to our place and whatever was not trapped behind layers of protective plastic sheets or covered in a ton of dust? Most of our earthly possessions were stored on the terrace during those long 5 days so we had to rummage through them and look for anything not painting-related – I was phoneless for a while because I couldn’t find my phone charger! It took us most of today to put everything back.

Ok, the place hasn’t been painted in about 15 years, so it was long overdue, but I am sooo not doing this again in near future.

_{I am purposely forgetting that we haven’t painted the spare room and that we’ll have to do it soon. I might have a breakdown if I thought about it too much. :P}

So, today my wife tells me that she does not, in fact, want to paint the new bedroom red any more. She’s not sure what colour she does want, but she doesn’t want red. And I’ve decided that I’m not going to paint the new office; I don’t really have any burning desire to change the colours, and I’d rather not just paint for the sake of painting. So we’ve got the hallway and the bedroom to do, and no idea what to do with them. So I’m going to mark this as done: we painted the two most important rooms, and that was enough of an accomplishment.

We painted the living room and the dining room over the weekend, with the help of a couple of friends. Friday night my wife and I worked on taping stuff up, patching and sanding more holes that we discovered, and finally moving everything we could to the middle of the room. That was almost 50% of the work right then. On Saturday, we started at about 9:00: my future sister-in-law came over and we painted for about three hours solid before we realized we probably needed more paint, which necessitated me going out and getting some. We were joined a little later by Fi (three girls and one guy painting, sounds about right), and by 9:30 we were DONE. Or at least, done for the night. It needed some touching up the next morning, but overall it went really well, and though it took more time than I’d thought, I think that we learned stuff we can use for the other two rooms (i.e., tell people to use painter’s tape as guidelines, not licenses to paint all over the place). I’ll put up pictures in the next couple days, but so far: so good.

I forgot how much of the painting job is all the stuff you need to do before you paint. This past weekend we washed the dining and living room walls, sanded down and filled cracks and holes in the drywall, and packed up & moved a lot of our stuff. There are currently boxes and coffee tables in the hallway and two additional bookshelves in our bedroom, and all the stuff that stayed in the living room is put together in the middle of the room. The TV, couch, birds, and wall unit are all within a foot of each other. It makes things a little crowded, but on the plus side, it’s like we’ve doubled the effective size of our tv!

There’s still a lot to do: throwing out the couch, taping down the edges, covering the outlets and light switches, and re-doing a few minor patches. But there was a lot done this weekend, so hopefully things go very smoothly on Saturday!

And that means painting, I guess. My wife is really dissatisfied with the way our apartment looks, and has come to the conclusion that even if it’s not ours forever, she would like it to be more than “ugly white walls” stocked with my “stuff”. So she has, with a tiny bit of input from me, decided how she would like the apartment rearranged, and what colours they will be when they’re rearranged. So far, the living room’s going to be two different shades of chocolate-coffee brown, the dining room will be a deep (but pale) green), and the main bedroom will move to the guest room/office and become a deep red-and-gold Asian-inspired cozy romantic space.

We don’t know what to do with the new office (old bedroom), because it’s going to be mostly my area, and I have absolutely no idea what colours to pick. My wife tried to help me by looking up the colour scheme of the Martian Manhunter, my favourite comic book super-hero, but the colours wouldn’t have worked very well. So we’re back to square one there. Still: lots of stuff to do before our first round of painting: we tackle the living room AND the dining room on December 6-7!

I always feel everything in my life is temporary. Which I guess it truly is….but I need to quit acting that way with my apartment. I LOVE my apartment and I know it is going to be my home for at least another 2 years. Therefore I need to make it my own. I need to put some color on the walls and call it home!

now we just need to clean it up and move in the new furniture! W00T! so next month, maybe we’ll get the paints we need for the office and living room. the bedroom color is still up in the air, though. we’ll save it for last.

I can’t afford to move so painting is a great way to change your surroundings without packing your plates. The obstacle? We have to start by painting the ceilings, which I do not think have been done since Kennedy was president. Dear lord…I hate painting ceilings.

4 more rooms to go!

my hubby used to work for sherwin williams… so now i get to take advantage of my husband’s late trade. we’re gonna go to sherwin tonight- if i can convince him when he gets back from work- and we’ll at least pick up the paint we need for the bathrooms. i’m gonna paint the main bathroom a slatish green color as seen in the photo. and the masterbath a sort of tannish color as seen above… the tone might change a little, i’ll see when i get to see the paints in person. right now i’m just going by what i see online, and i think my computer is lightening the colors a lot more than they really are…. so we’ll see. but that’s kind of the idea i’m going for. i want light accents in the green bathroom. i found these white sconces that would just look perfect. and i want darker accents in the brownish room. again, also finding lovely dark brown sconces that would look awesome. i love candles in the bathroom… sooo… romantic ::sigh:: i love the look of skin in candlelight… wet glistening bodies… okay, i’m done.