One Room Challenge Week 3
After last week, we got the demo done and the design concept nailed down. Now the first thing to tackle is getting the paint up on the walls!
If you didn’t catch either of the last posts, start from the beginning and see where this room started here! Also, please check out all of the amazing transformations happening for the Spring 2022 One Room Challenge here! There are so many awesome projects going on!!
So onto this week. My goal was to get everything attached to the room painted. Meaning walls, closet, and ceilings. Seems easy enough, right? Well, it isn’t as easy as slapping some paint on the walls. I’m pretty particular about my paint process and for me, the paint prep is the MOST important (and typically most time consuming) part of painting walls.
For me, I live in a 50 year old house. It’s been painted several times and had multiple holes filled and minor drywall repairs done. And typically they have been done half-@$$ so the drywall looks sketchy at best. My first step is to fill all of the holes in the walls/ceilings. Sometimes this is hard to see them all so I scan all of the walls with a flashlight to highlight any holes. You would be amazed at how many holes and divots there are after several years of things being hung and dings happening. So I fill them with drywall mud and I wait until it dries.
Next, I give everything a full sand. Not only will this sand down the holes I just filled, but this will also get rid of all of the bumps and dust/debris that got stuck in the previous paint or any raised areas of the wall. You can see in the image below the lighter colors are where I sanded off the bumps and imperfections so you can see previous paint colors underneath. As you can see, there were A LOT of imperfections. These were all over the walls and ceilings.
At the same time I am prepping the walls and ceilings, it is time to pick a color. As I showed you in my design concept in Week 2, my plan is to paint the walls black! Yep, BLACK! A little scary since it is such a small space, but I am super excited about it. But, there are about 5 million shades of black out there. And you can’t just look at a few color swatches and pick one. Well, you shouldn’t do that! It is SO IMPORTANT to paint samples in your space before you select a color. Paint will not look the same in every space or every light.
I typically pick my 3-5 favorites and get samples to put up on the wall. I try to put them up on 2-3 different walls as well to get a view of the color with different lighting (both natural and artificial). I will tell you, 80% of the time, my favorite color on the swatch is not the color I end up going with. Before I got samples, I was positive that Sherwin-Williams Tricorn Black was going to be the winner. It is a true black and seems to go with most everything. But I put samples up on the wall and SW Black Magic was the clear winner! It is crazy how lighting and your space can change the look of a color!
So the last step in paint prep before paint goes on the walls and ceilings is to wipe everything down. I get a bucket with some warm water, a tad of ammonia, and a rag and wipe everything down. This will get all of the dust that is leftover from sanding off. Make sure your rag is wrung out and just damp - otherwise it will wipe away all of the mud you just put in to fill your holes. Once everything is clean, it is my favorite time… PAINT TIME!
Oh yeah, you should tape off your outlets before you start painting, don't be lazy like me because this is what happens and now I have to change out the outlet! Boo!
I typically paint the ceilings first (or at least before my last coat of wall paint). Paint splatters, especially ceiling paint, so you are going to get little tiny dots of ceiling paint on your walls! So I knocked this out first before moving onto the walls.
Now, here comes the walls! I think paint is one of the most transformative ways to update a space. It can really make the space and it is such an inexpensive update if you are willing to spend the time to do it yourself! And painting the walls black is really going to transform this space! Here we go!
Painting is definitely a labor of love but it is one of my favorite DIY projects. Because I mean, what an impact!! What do you think of the black walls so far? Would love to hear your feedback! Stay tuned for next week when I add in the new flooring!
Happy DIYing + Designing!
Katie
To check out my previous posts in this series:
To check out other ORC participants - go HERE!!
