The first part of this exercise is spent preparing your canvas, and that may include painting. Painting a room is, for me, a very zen and calming exercise because it requires a great deal of concentration around the detail parts but lets you totally zone out during the big parts. Then, all of a sudden, you have this transformed space that often evokes a completely different feeling.

I tend to paint rooms in our house with some frequency; if I get an idea for a different color, I can’t withstand the old one for more than a couple weeks. So over the course of the last three years, I’ve learned a few things about painting a room.

Painting Rule #1: buying paint without looking at swatches in the room rarely delivers enviable results.

It’s kind of a pain in the ass to go to the paint store, find a few chips or sample pots you like, go home, look at them on your walls in different lights, go back to the store and order the paint. But it’s even more irritating to buy an entire gallon (or even a quart, for that matter) of something you think is going to be totally awesome that the next day makes you want to retch. Along with this rule goes the knowledge that just about any brand of paint will color match any other’s, or, for that matter, any decent-sized swatch of any color you can come up with, so don’t feel limited by the over-saturated, under-cool palettes you see at the store.

Painting Rule #2: Despite simply being more expensive, better paint is, in point of fact, better.

It’s no secret that I have a certain amount of disdain for “category killer” big box stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s. I understand that sometimes you need to paint on a Sunday, and that most smaller stores that sell good paint are all closed on Sunday. I also understand that sometimes an extra $12 is out of the question. But the pain of waiting a few more days or saving up a few more dollars will be mitigated by your results: the finish is just nicer and the coverage is better. Plus, you get to avoid standing in a line ten people deep waiting anxiously for your number to get called by someone who visibly has much better things to do. The first time I painted the bedroom, I used an entire gallon of Behr paint over a primed surface. This time around, I used a quarter of a gallon of Yolo Colorhouse without priming, which has led me to think that Yolo, for $40, covers about four times as well as Behr, which if I recall was somewhere around $26-$30. If you have a large job to do, you will absolutely end up saving money and getting better coverage. I was also very impressed with American Pride, also adorably marketed as Mythic Paint.

Painting Rule #3: Tools matter.

Buy the nicest synthetic brush you’re comfortable with ($8-$10) in about a 1 to 1 1/2 inch width and rinse it out when you’re done so you can use it for other projects. This brush will allow you to skip the bored-sigh-inducing step of taping off trim areas, which is an utter waste of time if you have a good trim brush and can learn to paint straight, even lines (windowpanes are a different story) by using the tip of the brush instead of the face, and spreading out a small amount of paint across and away from the line you’re painting. And you should probably have extra trim and wall paint handy, because even if you’re as stunningly gifted as I am at painting, you’ll still screw something up sometime.

I also greatly prefer smaller rollers – an inch in diameter instead of two:

Painting Rule #4: Trim does not have to be white.

I love the idea of monochromatic trim, so I used it in the bedroom:

Already, the room feels more comfortable and calmer. Next time, I’ll solve my storage dilemmas!

Tags: Projects

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 11:11 pm and is filed under DIY, Interiors, Thoughtful decorating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.