Life Lesson #1: Plan Ahead
Once you're covered in dust, paint, and sweat, you really don't want to make a trip to Home Depot to pick up last-minute supplies. We researched painting online, made lists, and tried to purchase everything we needed ahead of time.
Life Lesson #2: Just Do It
We've been talking about painting for at least a year now. We first started bringing paint chips home last 4th of July. Enough already! Pick out colors and paint!
Life Lesson #3: Don't Assume Anything
Like I mentioned, Jason had never painted a room before, and all I had ever done was roll (someone else did the cutting in in both rooms), so we decided beforehand that I would roll and Jason would cut in. Five minutes in, we were hating our tasks, and we switched places. Jason's arms could handle the rolling a lot better than my wimpy arms, and I was a natural at using the paint brush (duh, I PAINT as a second job... geez, why didn't I want to use the brush at first?).
Life Lesson #4: Everything Takes More Time Than Expected
Our master bathroom and half bathroom are probably the smallest rooms in our house. They should only take a few hours each, right? Wrong! We worked (I kid you not) 12 hours Saturday and 12 hours Sunday on those two tiny rooms. And we've still got 6 more rooms to paint in this house!
Life Lesson #5: Start with the Most Difficult Tasks First
One reason things took so long was our lack of painting experience. We thought it would be easiest to knock out large chunks of walls before working on the tricky parts. Wrong again! The toilet wall of our half bathroom is 3 feet across, and the toilet takes up over a foot and a half of that wall. It's MUCH easier to get behind the toilet to paint when the two walls beside you aren't painted! Case in point, I may have, um, backed into a painted wall...
Life Lesson #6: Everything is More Fun with a Friend
Maybe it's because I love spending time with Jason. Maybe it was the paint fumes. Either way, we had a great time painting together. Thank goodness we like each other, because the half bathroom (6.5'x3') is the world's tightest space! In 24 hours of painting, we talked about the new house, fixing up our current house, updates on friends, stuff from work, and other chit chat. We made up songs, sang lots verses of "Everybody cut, everybody cut..." (from Footloose), occasionally painted each other's legs or arms, and just other little fun stuff to make the time pass more quickly.
Painting isn't fun, but it's tolerable when you have a buddy.
5 comments:
Bathrooms are the worst rooms, they take the longest for any sort of fixing/remodeling/etc. Your other rooms will go faster and you will be amazed... because it shouldn't work that way (like the maps in "Emperor's New Groove").
If you need any help painting, let us know! I really enjoy painting walls, it's sort of cathartic for me.
Love your "rules" :) so true.
Remind me to tell you my "removing wallpaper from a bathroom" story... that was the day I decided that I was never going to 1) buy a house that had wallpaper on the walls or 2) put up wallpaper... ever.
Haha, I look forward to hearing the story. After years of watching "Trading Spaces," I feel the same way about wallpaper.
Love the rules! You two are so cute! Do you hire out? ;) You were right, it's way too expensive to hire a company to do the painting, so I'm going solo on doing mine...shall be interesting!
Shoot! I was hoping you'd hire someone, because I wanted a quote for our insanely-high stairway and master bedroom.
I will say things went better yesterday on the guest bathroom. We were done by 4:00 instead of 8:00!
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