Easy and Cheap(ish)-- We paint ALL THE THINGS!

Luckily (or unluckily) for us, I was working part-time in the paint department at Lowe's when David and I bought the house. Every single wall downstairs was painted semi-gloss orange. The neighbors told us the previous owners had a home in New Mexico and they were trying to recreate the Adobe look in our Texas farmhouse. Naturally, instead of BUYING a southwestern style home, they just painted everything orange and called it good enough.

This is Southwest....

This is just.... orange.

So we started with paint. It was something fairly easy that we could do ourselves, we needed to do a TON of it and my Lowe's connection meant I often had access to mis-tinted paints at a huge discount. Also, during a time when our septic was failing, the A/C units had been pillaged and hot-wired, and the hot-water line busted IN THE FRONT YARD as we pulled up with the U-Haul, it was important that David and I were able to take control of the renovation in a small way. We couldn't fix all of the many MANY issues that were adding up into the thousands, but we could grab a $39 gallon of paint and feel like we were making headway. 

The thing we weren't prepared for was the sheer VOLUME of paint it would take to make a dent in our home. The Living room took 18 gallons alone. Everything needed to be primed, and then several coats of paint. Don't tell me to use 2-in-1 paint with primer, because we did that. Don't tell me to use a more expensive type of paint because we did that too. Orange semi-gloss is impossible to cover. There was no solution except many many coats. 

Here are the overhead beams in the living room getting their first coat of stain. You can see here that we have primed the walls and ceiling. 

Remember those awful cedar stairs? They got stain and about 412 coats of white paint to match our trim. Here is a before-and-after shot. Start to finish, the stairs took about 72 hours and a case of beer. Painting like this is exhausting, because it requires you to contort yourself to fit those little bitty spaces. 

Painting the woodwork in our house was a huge challenge. I really dislike natural woodwork (except in the case of Victorian houses where it was never painted) and every windowsill, doorframe, and moulding in our house was raw cedar. It took 2 coats of primer and 3 coats of Valspar paint before it looked okay. 

Bedroom after. Color: Valspar Ultra in "Notre Dame"

Ceiling is a super-pale blue called "Watery" by Sherwin Williams. 

The front office got painted a super-dark greenish gray that was a custom mix I did at Lowe's.

Everything else we painted white until we could decide on more permanent colors. For what it's worth I learned a lot about painting. I got very VERY good at "cutting-in", and I swear I will never use Behr paint again. I love Valspar Ultra and Olympic ONE from Lowe's, but the Olympic ONE has since been discontinued. The Olympic ONE (if you can find it) is great for highly-textured walls like ours because it is thinner yet very pigmented. It sank into all the crevices of our knockdown texture, and gave really good coverage. 

Valspar Ultra is wonderful also, and it's handy that they can mix any color from Benjamin Moore, Martha Stewart, etc. if you just know the paint name. All the finishes in our house are Flat or Eggshell because I  just prefer the matte look. 

David and I estimated that we have spent close to $3,000 just on paint alone. We started painting the exterior also before we realized we couldn't get high enough on our ladders. So since last July, the Orange Monster has affectionately been called the Creamsicle, since it is now (to our neighbors DELIGHT) two-tone. In these pictures, you can really tell how ORANGE it was before. The listing photo made it seem sort of a dusty-tan or peach but it was ORANGE.

Next time-- we decide what to do about our plywood floors....