Our Labor Day weekend so far

I think that we have stayed pretty busy so far this Labor Day weekend. On Friday evening after eating dinner we headed over to Lowe's to get new filters for our air conditioner - oh, the joys of having 3 different air intakes. However, before we left for the giant home improvement store I suggested to Justin that we maybe buy the paint we had picked out for our half-bath downstairs.

Over a hundred dollars later we were on our way home with the filters as well as primer, paint, painter's tape and various other things that we needed to begin our new "careers" as painters.

On Saturday we painted. We took the mirror, towel holder, toilet paper holder and everything that we could out of the bathroom and then covered everything else with newspaper. Then we put the painter's tape all around the floorboards, door frame and the counter. Once we started with the primer, we realized that some of the stuff we bought that was supposed to be helping us was not as great as we would have thought.

For instance - we got this thing to use to paint the corners. Maybe we just bought a crappy one, but it really didn't work all that great for us. The only way for it to really get the corners like it was supposed to was to put so much primer on the thing that primer was dripping down the wall. Then, of course, we were trying to spread the primer around so that there weren't streaks down the wall when we were done. Hmmm.

We finished the primer and went to clean all our stuff while it dried. Oh - did I mention that it is difficult for two adults to be in a small half-bath together trying to paint? Our half-bath is about 5' by 3' and has a 9-foot ceiling. Add in the toilet and sink and there isn't a whole lot of room in there. It is especially difficult when you are trying to get the high places.

Anyway - once we got our stuff cleaned and dried, we headed back in to do the blue paint. To be more precise, Water Fountain is the color that we chose. The primer seemed dry (notice the use of the word "seemed" here) and so we started painting.

I started with the easy part - using the roller on the large, empty places on the wall. We both thought it was much easier to use the paint than the primer. We had already decided not to use our useless thing that we bought to paint the corners, but Justin started with another thing that we got to do the edges. It seemed to work fine all around the floorboards, door frame and counter, but then Justin put it on the extension pole we bought so he could get the wall that meets the ceiling. I should preface this part by saying that this particular item has little black things (I know - I am so technical) to protect the edges and claimed that you didn't need painters tape. We didn't buy it and taped everything anyway but of course with a 9-foot ceiling, we could not tape the edges of the ceiling. Needless to say, we now have quite a few blue spots on our ceiling.

Remember how I said that the primer "seemed" dry? We realized when Justin was doing the edges around the counter, that the primer wasn't quite dry there. Oops. Oh well - what to do now, right?

When we were all done with the blue paint we were actually pretty impressed with ourselves, just knowing that once we removed all the tape and newspaper, we would be very tempted to leave our current professions and begin our new careers as professional painters. However, that would have to wait because we had a dinner date. :)

Anyone that knows us very well knows that we don't go out to dinner very often. But we were going out to celebrate Justin's promotion and passing his Certified Information Systems Auditor exam. We decided to go to Benihana in order to celebrate. We had a nice dinner and then decided to head home to bask in the glory of our beautiful painting.

We started removing tape from the door frame and realized that we needed to be very careful and even then we were having some problems. What problems? you may ask (or even if you aren't asking, you know that I will tell you). Well because the paint is a latex paint, it easily peels off the wall when you are pulling off the tape. Even when we were being extra careful, it was still pulling off some of the paint with the tape. We will be doing some touch-up tomorrow. It looks really bad around the counter and a little bad around the door frame.

The other problem we had is that somehow paint dripped down the corners back behind the toilet. Not just paint, primer had dripped too and it was pooled on the floor. Hmmm, looks like we didn't get things taped up and protected with newspaper was well as we thought we had. It also looks like tomorrow we will not only be touching up some of the blue paint around the edges, we will also be repainting the floorboards in the bathroom.

We will post some pics of the bathroom once we are all done. I guess the only way to learn is to practice, right?