We trotted off to Lowes to buy paint. For the undercoat, we bought a budget Lowes brand. For the topcoat we took their recommendation of Valspar. We chose the ultra white eggshell finish.
Mr. Remodel set about painting the undercoat helped by Mrs. Remodel who painted the corners and the strip between the wall and ceiling. Considering we were covering up some pretty strong colours, the budget undercoat did a pretty good job.
Goodbye art studio purple paint.
Goodbye living room green paint.
The same went for the master bedroom (which had been painted peach) and the master bathroom. Suddenly all the differences between old and new drywall, the purple board, and the cement board disappeared and everything was more uniform.
All was going according to plan. Of course in DIY that phrase can be the kiss of death (or at the very least a very nasty paper cut) and so it was for us when it came to putting on the topcoat.
Mr. Remodel started painting on the topcoat and from early on it didn’t look good. The paint covered very poorly. Now one reason could be the skills of the painter. Well Mr. Remodel is a very good painter with lots of experience in doing so. He painted the entire inside and outside of a prior home in Hawaii and did a lot of painting in our last home with no signs of patchiness on the walls. Another reason could be the undercoat but that didn’t make sense because there were lots of areas where the undercoat had covered the underneath colour perfectly and looked very even. Yet when the topcoat was put on there were lots of patches.
Back to Lowes we trotted. They hadn’t had any similar complaints about the paint and suggested we try contacting Valspar directly. They hadn’t heard about this problem either and asked for some pictures, which Mr. R sent them so they could look into the matter. That was a long time ago and we’ve never heard back. Thank you for the ‘great’ customer service Valspar.
Mrs. R thought we should go for another brand but Mr. R thought maybe it was just a bad tub of paint so he tried another one. Same problem. By this time, there was too much of it on the walls to change to another brand so we bought some more but we weren’t very happy. It’s over $100 for a five-gallon tub so the paint bill was beginning to add up. Mr. Remodel tried giving the walls a second coat. Same problem.
In the end, he developed a technique for laying it on extra thickly so it looked more even. It produced a better look although not as perfect as we had expected. We hoped that the play of shadows and eventually getting our stuff in the rooms would hide the patches. Ultimately, the painting took about three times the time we thought it would and, unhappily, cost a whole lot more than we would have wanted.
As I have said before, the pictures, no matter how detailed cannot adequately portray the passage of time (particularly delays and struggles) and frustrations involved in individual projects and the remodel as a whole. You will never get the full picture unless you have your own experience or you embark on this kind of venture yourself.
One of the frustrations was having the plastic sheeting on the floor for so long. It got covered in grit from the various comings and goings of work boots but couldn’t be vacuumed making the house, as a whole, dirtier than it needed to be.
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