Saturday, February 7, 2009

3rd Time's the Charm

There it is, my blue wall - finally! It only took three gallons of paint to get it right. The first one the guy mixed the wrong color, the second gallon was simply not as cool as on the swatch, and the third one is just right. This photo has the flash on, so it's not quite right in the picture. The color of the wall is that beautiful ceramic cobalt blue. (Like the toilet I wanted) I still need to put one more layer of paint on, but after all the hiccups from this morning I think I'm going to sit down and watch a movie! I'm pooped.
Here's the wall in it's previous blue:
I've been looking everywhere for the right color. Cobalt blue does not seem to be in style at the moment. I thought I'd gotten the right color, and the swatch is really nice, but the color is so different when you get the whole wall painted. In the picture above you can see the old color with the new color swatch painted on top of it. Look how dusty the old color looks. The new color is so much more vibrant. Matches the fan better too! I thought I had finished the wall last night, and in night-time-light the wall looked fine. But in morning-sunshine-light it looked awful.
The plan was for Leah to help me insulate the basement today. I was going to pick her up from Home Depot to help me get insulation. I figured I could run a few errands before picking her up. Nothin' doin'. So we had to do them afterwards. Fine. Got home looked at the wall Leah agreed the new blue we picked up at Home Depot would be better. (Did I mention that the only color close to what I wanted was the Ralph Lauren paint - which is the most expensive paint in the store? Figures).
We trotted down to the basement and began. That plan was to shove insulation between the joists and everything else in the basement to try to do something about the heat on the first floor. After about an hour and a half of basement dirt falling into our eyes, fiberglass dust flying around (yes we were wearing masks, gloves and eye protection - sort of) we decided to have lunch to see if we were even doing this right. You'd think I would have looked into this ahead of time. Everything Leah read on the internet said to keep the kraft paper towards the wall? This didn't seem logical. Half the pages said, "Insulate!" The other half said "Don't bother".
We called Toni - Home Depot and Nicole, (in that order) and asked them. Nicole had the most confident answers so we decided to do it her way. BUT - she said you can't shove insulation in, that it functions best when it can lie completely flat. Well, that's not how mine is. Part of the problem is that my joists are closer together than standard sized stuff is in a house. So I may have to cut things down to size to get it in there. Then her next piece of advice is to use Tyvek to also help buffer and keep things up where they belong. I was hoping not to have to. And as usual, the quick and easy job I thought it was going to be has exploded into a major project. Ugh. When will I learn? We were feeling itchy from the fiberglass, (we really need tyvek suits), so we decided to call it a day. I think the fates are telling me to take a break finish one project and regroup. There are ten billion things I could be doing, but I think I need to just sit down with my feet up, admiring my blue wall, watch a movie and knit something. Then I can make a new list of all the things I have to do.

PS: I'm sorry about this post - I don't seem to be able to edit at this time. I hope it all makes sense. :)

1 comment:

Scrappy said...

I love the blue. You made the right choice to redo it. I just repainted my hallway and boys room and the perfect paint was RL also. I decided that another beige in a cheaper brand would work for me, I mean who cares about beige, right? But your blue was worth it (in my opinions, but then again I am not the one that paid for it!) :-)
Oh, and I LOVE the way that blue works with the shelf color and the next room too! Beautiful!