Chapter 19 - Paint!

So how many gallons of paint does it take to cover both the inside and outside of our house? Well, let’s see how much fun we can have with this…ok? Like that carnival game where you are supposed to guess the exact number of jelly beans in the jar, I’m not going to reveal the exact number of gallons until the end of this chapter. In the meantime, feel free to respond to the blog with your guess and we’ll see who came closest. I’ll give you some clues to help you out.

Clue #1 – If you remember from the drywall chapter, we nearly replaced the entire inside of the home’s drywall. The new drywall AND the older drywall were all textured to make the walls and ceilings consistent through the home. This meant that we had to repaint the ENTIRE inside of the home…six bedrooms, five bathrooms, kitchen, family room, living and dining rooms.

Clue #2 – Before the paint can go on the walls; the new drywall had to be primed. I guess primer isn’t considered paint, but I don’t know why because it goes on like paint and looks like it?

Clue #3 – After priming the new drywall, we started by painting the ceilings. I’m not sure what order the pro's go in…the walls or ceilings first….but we thought it best to start from the top and work our way down. We borrowed a paint sprayer from a friend, Mary & Bernhard Schneider, for this job, but soon found out the sprayer was a little underpowered and wasn’t putting down an even spray pattern. So we got another paint sprayer and put on two more coats of flat white paint to cover all of the ceilings. Most of the ceilings in the home are only 8’ high, so reaching them wasn’t difficult…but oh what crooked necks we had the next day! Ouch! The great room ceiling is vaulted two stories. Just like when we had to scrape the popcorn texture off the ceilings before, we rigged up some scaffolding and planks to span over the staircase. Scarrry!!

Clue #4 – I think ½ the ceiling paint actually fell down onto us rather than got up onto the ceilings, as you can see in this photo. Hilarious!

Clue #5 – Next came the walls. But before we could start spraying again we first had the laborious task of taping and masking all of the doors, windows and ceilings that we just painted. This task itself took an entire day to finish. Just like the ceiling, we sprayed two coats on the new walls, first going in an up and down motion, then a horizontal pattern. This was just like doing squats in gym class, but for 8 hours! It was almost impossible for either of us to get out of bed the next morning.

Clue #6 – Let’s go outside, ok? First up was to tackle the eves, and the first step was to prime the wood. There was some new construction to paint, and much of the older wood eves after 30 years actually had very little paint left on them. So of course priming was very important. Thankfully the scaffolding from the stucco work was still up, so actually getting to the high points on the home was pretty easy. The ugly part of this task was that spraying in such tight areas created a lot of overspray. Check out this photo! In just a few
hours I changed colors. Ha ha.

Clue #7 – It was exciting to actually be putting some color on this house when we moved outside to paint the walls. The color we finally decided on actually came from a combination of two paint colors. We didn’t want the color to be too pink, too yellow or too red. We ended up with a muted peach. As the roof tiles have now been put down, and black balcony and fence railings have been installed, the peach is toning down. I think that once the stone work is in place and the landscaping is in that it’ll be just right. Back to the amount of paint used, remember to consider in your guess that we again applied two coats on the house.

Clue #8 – The brick fence wall around the front and both sides of the home had become discolored over the years, so I had it covered in stucco. We chose to paint the stucco in the same color as the house. Mitzi painted all of the walls by herself. In fact, even though I might have started out painting,

Mitzi did most of the painting on the outside of the home, even showing great courage and getting up to the high points of the structure. (I think she really liked using the paint sprayer and having the power in her hands.)

Ok, so do you have a good guess tabulated yet on the total gallons used on this home? Remember, primer and paint, two coats both inside and outside.

165 gallons!

Were you close?

Alex from Home Depot - Our Paint Expert! He promised to give us his apron as a memento of our 165 gallons