Redecorating: Repainting the Walls

As there are a few steps to me getting settled into where I currently live, "Redecorating" will be a short series of posts covering topics in regards to decorating my room along with pictures of the progress as I get a chance to take them.

So back in August I moved, renting a room in a friend's house. Almost 6 months later, I'm still liking the arrangements and getting ready to host our second party. Ultimately, I'm hoping that I'll be able to call that home until I graduate as I just find moving a pain in the ass. In any case, the room when I first moved in was kind of bright colorwise, so I wanted to dim it down a bit as well as find a color that is more representative of myself. As a result, I was looking for a color that was blue-green. Overall, I really love how it came out, so here are the photos below of my progress:

Off to the right, and above the door you can see the original color.  Here, I painted the first to walls in this small corner of the room.

Here is a shot after I painted the rest of the room, you'll notice that the color in the main part of the room is a darker color.  I'll touch on this again in a moment, but first I want to touch on how I went about painting my room.  So I first taped around the ceiling to try and avoid painting the ceiling.  Unfortunately, when I pulled the tape off I wound up taking off some of the paint and need to get a finer brush to touch up some of these edges.  Also, I avoided taping up the trim for the most part as I am planning on repainting it eventually as well.  One last point to make is that I used a paint that included primer in it - Behr's (fill this in later) - which helped a lot in the speed of getting the job done.  However, the previous paint was satin and I didn't de-gloss the walls, which did make it a little rough getting the new paint on the wall, haha.



Back to the walls in general, I covered the walls with two coats of paint with a roller.  As you can notice I have a subset of my furniture in the room still as I was painting, and I can say that it was probably a mistake, as any kind of painting producing splatter.  Fortunately, I lucked out and for the most part I haven't noticed getting paint on anything except the wall, tape, and the painting paper I laid down on the ground.  The majority of the splatter was only apparent on my glasses as I had to chip pieces of paint off them later that evening.  So if I were doing this again, I would probably settle for having my contacts on instead.  Also, it would have paid to be slightly less lazy, and moved the rest of the furniture out of the room.  I think overall it took more time than it should because of trying to be careful about not getting paint on it.

Alright, so the walls are painted.  Why the hell did I use two different tones?  As you can see from this shot in the right, the two tones seem to blend pretty well together, and in the daylight here, they actually look almost identical.  Since my room has a corner with the door that is recessed, there is less light hitting that part of the room.  As a result, I picked a lighter tone to paint that corner of the room so it didn't come across as dark when looking at the room from the hallway or from this angle.  I took my inspiration for doing this from the templates provided from Home Depot actually.  In one of them, they showed a bathroom with the layout.  Although in their case, there was slightly more contrast present.  I'm not the most comfortable with sharp contrasts, so this was my twist on what I thought was a great idea with a room that isn't just one shape - i.e. square or rectangle.

So what's next?  I need to touch up the edges with a finer brush, both along the ceiling and the trim.  Also, I need to find an adequate color to paint the trim.  Keeping the trim white doesn't feel like the best fit with the colors I picked out, and I haven't decided how sharp a contrast I want between the trim and walls.  For the moment, the best suggestion I've received so far is using an off-white/cream color.  Since the color is a little more blue than green in hue, I've also thought about using a trim that tinted green, but the few samples I've tested have been a little bit more green than I was hoping.

Beyond more painting, I need to get stuff up on the walls, which I still haven't gotten too.  Getting stuff up is a little more involved than just putting up posters and prints, so I'll cover that in a separate section as I progress further.