It's been an uninspiring peachy colour for the last 3 years and the colour has never really worked, the colour scheme as a whole, the kitchen units/worktops/flooring and paint colour were fine together but the paint colour by itself was just too....bleurgh, insipid and as I must spend more of my time in the kitchen than in any other room something had to be done.
If I'd been planning this in England I'd have gotten a paint chart from Dulux and then some tester pots and my walls would have become a patchwork of different colours, but here it's a bit different. Yes, you can buy ready mixed paint but the range of colours available ready mixed isn't so huge (Germans tend towards white, white or white when it comes to painting their (woodchip covered) walls) what happens here is you go along to the local DIY shop (we have a new big one now after the old shed got burnt down - I'm not kidding) with a sample of the colour you want your walls to be, it's scanned into a machine and then custom mixed (yeah, I know this happens in Blighty too, but in my 15 years of home ownership there I think I only used custom mixed paint once, if at all, and I've painted pretty much every room of every house we've owned, at least once)
I took my German teacher with me to buy the paint, just in case they started using lots of technical words that I didn't know and before I knew it I'd bought 50 litres of tartan paint. We were served by a young(ish) Herr Di Simone (Sicilian, don't you know) who was reasonably charming, but not sufficiently that Muna was prepared to exchange English lessons for his home cooking (can't blame a guy for trying & Italians do love to flirt) as well as 60+ litres of paint we came away with those funny paper coveralls, a couple of rollers & new brushes, he was trying to convince me to take the cheap ones but I told him I wanted some that the bristles didn't fall out of - I do hate that, don't you? Especially when you then have to pick out the loose bristles from the wet wall. Di then figured he was onto a cashcow and suggested a stick for the roller so I could reach the top of the wall (I told him no, I'd stand on a chair, like I always do) or a funny doughnut shaped roller for the corners...but how does that help in the ceiling corners? So that was another no, I think he got his pound of flesh anyway, especially as I bought enough rollers so that I wouldn't have to wash them out but could throw them away, I hate trying to get the paint out of rollers, it never works and they never dry properly.
So that was my weekend, 9-10 hours of painting spread over 3 days (have to leave 8 hours or so between repainting it said on the tin) I had a little 'help' with a couple of the walls from Jas, she was desperate to be involved and then discovered it to be rather dull and not quite as easy as she'd thought (rollers are pretty heavy when laden with paint and there was no way I was letting her loose with a brush at the edge of the walls) But I quite enjoy painting walls (hate ceilings and skirting boards - but we don't have them in our house, skirting boards that is) I put some music on and go for it, and then before you know it the whole room has changed.
What do you think?
before
during
after
No comments:
Post a Comment