Bye McDuplex

It’s time to say goodbye to the McDuplex and paint over the red paint. In order to paint over such a dark color, we (some friends and I), first, had to prime the walls. A coat of pure white made such a difference. The whole room opened up and looked much more inhabitable. We hit a couple of snags in the priming process though. First of all we noticed some bubbling of the paint after putting the primer on it. I decided to start scraping those areas and the paint just kept peeling. We weren’t able to finish the priming because once the paint was scraped it needed to be sanded and smoothed with wallboard/joint compound before being primed. The pictures show what the walls looked like with the red paint and after being primed and scraped. Another snag was that someone had made some marks with a blue marker that refused to be primed over. It’s best not to write on walls at all… but if you are going to, please don’t use marker! It will either require sanding off or multiple coats of primer letting each coat dry fully (which takes at least an hour).

I wasn’t planning to do anything more than prime the walls this weekend, but my friends who were helping me were also willing to paint the ceilings. By the time they were done with that, I realized that the walls that I wanted to be my accent walls were done drying and could be painted my non-neutral color. Some people will baulk at such a bold color, but after initial apprehension we applied the orange paint, it dried slightly darker than it was in the paint can, and really does look good. It actually really makes me happy. We even painted a lot of the kitchen, which needed some sort of pick-me-up. Moral of this story, don’t be afraid of color. After all, it’s just paint. Unfortunately the yellow is still around and the horrid red door so my main level now looks like the warm half of the color wheel.