I know it sounds pretentious, but I love Ralph Lauren paints. Great quality, great colors, and they’re only a little bit more expensive.
After the too-long trip to Home Depot, (our boy says "you guys always lie to me about Home Depot") we carelessly began sponging paint around the house, and it started looking really cool, really fast.
As soon as the first few splotches were applied, I came to the first roadblock. A nail hole. OH NO! A NAIL HOLE! We’d better spackle!
I rummaged around on the shelf where I thought I left the spackle and putty knife the last time we painted some walls, and voilà– it’s there! My handy-dandy 5 minute (30 second?) spackle can. Red Devil One Time spackle is good stuff. As long as you’re not trying to patch a hole that a watermelon could fly through, it works really well. Just spread it on until the hole is filled, and it dries in 5 minutes.
So, the first wall was all spackled and I got ready to charge off with my crazy sponge when my even-headed spouse pointed out the fact that maybe we should sand the spots first, so the texture won’t show through the paint. Luckily, I remembered something a burly construction guy once told us: "Dude, you don’t need to sand that stuff, just wipe over it with a damp towel to smooth it out. Perfect! Yet another corner cutting technique. It works beautifully–wipe the excess putty off once it’s dry, and you’re done.
I hear my crazy sponge calling me again and we’re off. Sponging has got to be one of the easiest ways to get color on a wall. Dip your sponge in the paint, and dab it on the wall. This is my kind of project. Get started up in a corner and dab away, down and out from the corner. You’ll need to cover some areas with more paint and others with less to create a uniformly uneven effect. I know it sounds silly, but that’s what works.
When you have to take a break, or if you’re working in an area where you’ve got to stop for a minute to move stuff before you trip on it, be sure that you don’t leave a hard edge where you’ve stopped sponging. Put a few individual splotches, overlapping the edge where you stopped, and a few more spots out in the yet-to-be-painted area adjacent to the break. Now you can stop. This makes it much easier to blend the new wet paint into the drier area that you’ve already done.
As we were cruising along, we came across a couple of areas that needed to be masked and also some spider webs that were long overdue for their annual demolition, but that’s about all the prep we did. A little spackling, a little masking, and nothing more.
It’s important to keep in mind that we only set out to test a little spot, just to see if that awful color was going to work and 2 hours later, we’d accidentally painted half the living room and a third of the other living room. (yes, we have a weird house). I hope yours comes out as nice as ours did; this was a great, low-budget, high-impact project for our Shak.
All we need now is one of these curvy bookshelves.
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