Painting the big room

I've done a lot of little projects in the last month, I'll probably get around to talking about them at some point, but not in this entry. I had a long weekend last week and tackled one of the bigger projects for the Living/Dining Room, painting the ceilings and the walls.

I borrowed a paint sprayer from work to use on the ceiling, as I've heard some stories about difficulties painting textured-ceilings.

Before: the hallway...

Before: I covered everything near the ceiling that I didn't want white...

Before: I only partially dismantled the dining room chandelier

Before: I don't know if it shows well in the pictures, but the ceiling had a lot of dark-discolorations

I've had limited experience with paint-spraying down on the boats, but this was easily the largest space I've sprayed before.

I bought a 5-gallon pail of the ceiling paint and only went through about half of it, and the whole thing took me about an hour-and-a-half by myself, including cleaning the sprayer out again after I finished. Better than I expected, it needs a few touch-ups and I nicked the edges a little later when I did the walls, but I'm happy with how it turned out.

The next day I finished prepping the walls, taping around doors and windows, trying to find any holes that the crew might've missed while spackeling, etc. Then my mom came over and helped me with the first coat of the blue walls...

Before: the walls were grimy, greasy, and drawn-on.

Before: The interior walls were ready for blue...

During: with my improvised bandana and fresh-shave, I was ready to get up on my perch and put my riverboat edge-painting skills to good use...

During: While rolling began on the other side...

During: She left the high stuff for me...

During: Down the hallway

After: Jumping ahead here, both colors + ceiling are finished here...

The next day the new Halo game was released. I resisted temptation and pressed on. I did the second coat of blue in the morning and took a break. About mid-afternoon I cracked open the lighter color for the exterior walls and started trimming the ceiling.

During: ceiling trimmed, because of my remarkable dedication to the philosophy of getting it right the first time, trimming everything for the lighter color alone took about 2 hours.

During: Then I started right into the rolling...Several hours later I finished the first coat.

After: Then I stayed up until about 2 in the morning to finish the second coat..

After: because I didn't ever want to paint again...

After: At first it looked a lot more beige than I had wanted...

After: but I wasn't about to paint it again...it's either grown on me now or my original perspective was negatively impacted by lack of sleep.

You may recall the photoshopped image I posted on a previous blog of what I envisioned for the living room walls, but just in case you aren't the Xanadu-enthusiast I expect you to be, I'll post again here, followed by the "end" result:

Before: Photoshopped.

After: Actual, still no carpet, vent-covers or new baseboard.

And, just to be thorough on this return to the blog, here are the obligatory 'Before & After' videos:

Goodnight.