Saturday, November 11, 2017

Day 746: Crossing off the to do list

You may be wondering why we're back in the bathroom this week. The reason, unfortunately, is that we never finished the work. Got distracted with demolishing a kitchen and never had the time and/or motivation to get back to the original job. 

So a year on and the bathroom was still not painted. We kind of got used to the pink colour of plaster. But after painting the downstairs lounge, I was finally inspired to paint the bathroom. The good news is that it's a tiny room, the bad news also is that it's a tiny room. One with furniture that's difficult to move around. 

This took a bunch of drop cloths and skill (had to say that) to get done. 

First job was to finish up some of the plaster imperfections. In hindsight, we should have plastered long before finishing off the tiles. It made it a bit tougher for Jim and some of the joints between tile and wall weren't perfect - and so they needed a little touchup before painting. This involved some fine plaster patch compound a lots of sanding (cough .. dust). We also gave the rest of the walls a light sand to make sure the new primer would stick.

After that was finished, it was on to the actual painting. First drop cloths were laid down across anything that couldn't be moved. And yes, people had to "hold it" or face my wrath. 


The first coat was the No Nonsense new plaster paint. I'm a big fan of this paint as it goes on nice and thick and coats/adheres fantastically well. I'll keep using it as long as there is bare plaster to paint in the house.

A couple coats of this and things were already starting to look good. The big concern I had was people steaming up the room while the paint was still drying. Because of this, I had to time the painting with everything else going on in the house. And people had to not shower for a day. I'm glad that the girls aren't teenagers yet - this part could have been devastating!


The next weekend was time for the big show, the final coat! We spent the week again deciding on paint colours (yeah). But like the menu at a good restaurant, there thankfully weren't many options to choose from in the specialised bathroom paint category. Unlike the menu at a good restaurant, some of the options would have left a pretty bad aftertaste. Who picks these colours?

So again going with Dulux, we really had to choose between 2 colours (white and white). We went with white. The colour was Rock Salt and in this case, matt isn't an option. Sheen it is.    

The results were really good. Better than expected. Anyone not following this blog would have had no idea what the original starting place was or that the back wall was moved 12 inches. The room is still not 100% finished (trimwork etc.) but it's been move a long way forward now that it's painted. Glad to finally get this off my to-do list, back to the rest of the house now.