The Problem Child

More painting was upon us this weekend! As mentioned in a previous blog, the prep work takes a LONG time. In turn, when you have the space prepped, the spraying goes very quickly.

When we arrived to Wallpaper Acres on Friday evening, we were ready to begin the prep work to spray the downstairs formal living and dining along with the foyer. I started taping off the chair rail and then the fun started...the tape ripped off the primer and paint that we had worked all last weekend on. So then I tested out the rest of the chair rail and it was just peeling off! What an exciting discovery...when I started this blog, I said that I would be transparent and at this moment, I just felt defeated. We had spent the majority of the previous weekend fighting the oil-based paint and here was another issue that we ran into. The formal dining room literally has thrown us challenge after challenge and was quickly becoming the problem child of this project. I started sanding down the chair rail while John focused on prepping the rooms for paint. We decided that the ceiling needed a second coat and John knocked that out; however, that meant that we could no longer tape the ceiling to spray the crown molding. Meanwhile, I had only covered roughly 6 ft of chair rail in 2.5 hours and this was just not a sustainable pace. When we left, we were feeling dejected and contemplated our game plan for Saturday.

We got to the house bright and early Saturday morning and started the taping process. We had to cover the ceiling to ensure that the paint for the crown molding did not spray onto the ceiling. we also discovered that some areas still needed caulk. Try caulking with one hand...that is a lot of fun! I disappeared to watch 6-year-old soccer while John stayed and finished caulking and taping off the ceiling. We ultimately decided to rip out the chair rail and will replace in the future with something that matches our taste and the house better. After that, John was able to get the crown molding painted. Now we wait, literally watching paint dry!

We ran back over Saturday night in hopes to tape off the crown molding...still drying so we were unable to get any additional tasks completed. Thus, we went to Costco...our happy place!

Sunday was more of the same in prepping for paint and we were fighting the plastic and tape and were not being very successful. All that was left was to tape off couple of doorways and the crown molding that was painted the previous day. The perception for taping prep is always that it is going to take an hour....3 hours later on just taping the crown molding, we were ready for paint. 15 minutes later, we had the prepped rooms sprayed...all that prep for 15 minutes...oh the joy of painting! We still have one more coat to do but we do love the color and are happy with our choice - Sherwin Williams, Fresh Eucalyptus.

And the icing on the cake...as we were walking out, all the the crown molding tape/plastic started falling and ripped away from the wall...good news, no paint (aside from a few spots) on the crown molding...bad news, we get to prep the crown molding again prior to doing the next coat - oh joy!

Carpet is getting installed upstairs on Tuesday of this upcoming week so we are definitely looking forward to that as we need a win this week! That's all for now; here's to a good week and positive steps forward, not backward!