This weekend was devoted to painting the paneling in our family room. This was something we’ve planned on doing ever since moving into the house, but it seemed like such a daunting task, we didn’t get around to it until this weekend. We originally planned on hiring someone to do it for us, but after two years of procrastinating and watching roughly two thousand hours of HGTV, we decided we could probably just do it ourselves.
So Friday night, we headed out to Home Depot and bought the paint and supplies. We got home and got to work. It took us roughly two hours just to get the room ready to paint, taking off all of the faceplates, moving the furniture, and taping. By around 9pm, we had the room ready to go.
It was important that we could still watch TV at a moment's notice.
We started painting on the primer using the rollers to see if it would be possible to avoid having to paint all of the grooves individually. As it turns out, it wasn’t. Ugh. So we got to work going around the room painting each indivivual groove and by a little after 11, we had most of the grooves done up to the point we could reach without using a stool.
We considered just leaving it like this, but were afraid that lions might try to eat the room.
At that point, we decided to call it a night, since we knew that no matter what, we’d have a long day of painting on Saturday. It turned out that one gallon of primer wasn’t quite enough to cover the whole room either, so we knew we’d have to go buy more paint.
So Saturday morning, we got up and headed off to get some breakfast and take another trip to Home Depot to pick up more paint. We were painting again by around 11am and had the rest of the grooves painted by 12:30 pm. It took maybe another hour to roll on the rest of the primer. At that point, we had to let the primer dry before doing anything else, so we watched America’s Next Top Model and tried to resist the urge to take a nap.
Once the primer was reasonably dry, we got to work on the daunting task of once again painting every single groove in the paneling. We had a short break in the form of my sister stopping by to pick up some bins she had been storing in our basement, but it wasn’t long before we were painting again. By around 5:30 we had all of the grooves up to where we could reach painted again, and decided to power through and finish off the groove-painting before dinner.
The walls, they bleed.
Towards the end of painting the top grooves, it was getting really difficult to lift my arms above my head and I started to feel a bit woozy. So we ordered Thanh Do for dinner watched Project Runway while the paint dried. I was glad for the break.
After dinner, we finished off the top coat with the rollers and were done for the day around 8pm. We spent the rest of the night watching TV. After Meghan went to bed, I decided to come back downstairs and watch Fringe (which was awesome). While watching it, I heard one of the cats pawing at the plastic behind the couch and went to shoo him away from it, only to find Ace had peed on it and was trying to cover it up. (Stupid cat!) It smelled nasty, so I decided that piece of plastic was done and rolled it up and threw it away. (Stupid cat!)
By Sunday morning, neither Meghan or I were very motivated to paint anymore. I desperately wanted to just touch up the really bad parts and be done with it, but Meghan insisted we do a complete second coat. Eventually I agreed and, after a run to Burger King for breakfast, where we were served by The Stupidest Person On The Planet, we got to work. Luckily, we didn’t need to paint the grooves again, just do the edging and roll on another coat. Even so, being as sore as I was, this seemed like the most hellish torture known to man.
My goal was to get all of the painting done by noon, so I could watch the Vikings game, and we did pretty good. We finished the second coat at 12:30 and decided to watch the game while the paint dried. The Vikings won, and by 4:30, the room was completely done and put back together.
Hooray!
The color (“Mochachino”) is interesting, because when we got the first coat on, I thought it looked really green. But when we did the second coat, it didn’t look green at all. Now sometimes when I look it, it seems green, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Soon after finishing up, we got calls from both Meghan’s friend Naomi and Meghan’s sister, saying they were going to be stopping by (for completely unrelated reasons), so we got to show off the room while we had an impromptu mini-party, which was fun.
I ended up falling asleep around 10:30pm (a rarity for me), completely exhausted from the weekend. I woke up this morning and was still a bit dazed and had to postpone a 9:30 meeting because I couldn’t get my brain to work.
So yeah, we’ve decided if we ever want to change the color, we just going to hire somebody to paint that room.
We still plan on painting all of the the trim in the house white, though. So you have that blog to look forward to.
Looks awesome! And yeah, painting is a huge pain in the ass. We can never bring ourselves to hire somebody else to do it, either.