Painting perfection: when to repaint a white room white! Guest room ORC Week 4
New here?
If you're new to this blog from the ORC site, welcome!! I'm Suzannah, a longtime DIYer and design lover currently making over our 1937 Tudor revival style home, our second fixer-upper. I have a 2-year-old and baby on the way, but my husband and I have done almost all of the work on our homes ourselves! I've blogged about all of it so you can check out my tutorials page and room reveals to see. You can also follow along with me and my projects on Instagram! I also co-host the Your Home Story podcast!
See all my posts about this ORC here!
Perfect painting and wall patching
A little background on the house where this guest room is. It belongs to my friends/clients Gabriela and Matt, who bought it 3 years ago and immediately had the floors refinished and all the rooms repainted. It's a pretty classic 1961 home and had most of the original features, but had seen some funky improvements from the previous owners including different bold paint colors in every room. It was a great fresh start to have all of the rooms repainted white--they choose Simply White by Benjamin Moore, in flat for the ceilings and eggshell for the walls.
When I've walked through their home, I've never noticed anything wrong with the walls, so I was wondering why they wanted to repaint in this room even though we decided not to change the color.
Gabriela and Matt have high standards, and weren't happy with the quick job the painter did 3 years ago. Let me tell you why!
Aside from a few scuffs that happen pretty commonly on flatter light-colored paint, when you looked up close there were noticeable bad patches throughout. The walls have their original c. 1961 sandy texture (pre-orange peel, post-plaster), but the patches were smooth. Pretty obvious when you look!
To get a similar texture, they mixed in this very cool product: sand texture paint additive. You stir it in with the paint (amount depends on how textured your walls are and apply with a roller. Do this over a smoothly patched area.
If you have orange peel walls, the same principle applies: do a smooth patch with plaster mud, and then apply texture to match the rest of the walls. You can buy spray cans of orange peel texture, couple different varieties available, or use a gravity feed spray gun/hopper like we did at our last house--we had a LOT of patches to do and retexture!
You can still tell where the patches were if you really try, but this is SO much better than the flat patches from before!
My fave painting tips
Once you have the patching and texture done... here are my fave tips!
- Gabriela and Matt are pro at painting, but I did share this great tip with them on how to get full coverage with just one coat: roll only about a 3'x3' area with each dip of the roller. It feels like you should be able to get more coverage out of it, but if you do, you'll end up with thinner areas in some places. Just stick to that 3'x3' square and then fill the roller again. Trust me!!! You only need one coat even for bold colors this way!
- Remove light switch plates and outlet covers. There is NO reason not to. It will make your life so much easier.
- Don't tape unless you absolutely have to. Taping/prep is the slowest part. Use an angled 1.5" or so brush to cut in edges like ceilings (scrape off one side so you only have paint on the side that faces the wall), and keep a wet rag next to you to clean off any areas where you go over. It's so much faster!!
Hope these have been helpful!
Next week this room will really start to look like something!
Follow along with all my posts about this ORC here!
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