Laume's Studio

Here's my living room with just the ceiling and one wall painted.

I managed to get the entire living room base coat painted yesterday. I even got all the trim and shelving painted as well, in what was left of the quart of semi-gloss after William knocked it over, spilling most of it out onto the hardwood floors. This is the SECOND quart of paint we've lost to spill during this project! I dropped the first one. It's so hard to work around all that furniture - but there's simply no place left to move it out of the way. So I just moved it from one side of the room to the other side to do the ceiling and now it's all pushed to the middle. William pulled back the plastic over the couch last night and watched the big screen t.v. (inside the tall cabinet) from just a few feet away. That can't be good for your eyes.

Of course I'm not finished yet. Now it's time to do several layers of "wash" over the gold.

I started out using the rest of the quart of paint I'd made by combining two different colors together to make the color I wanted as the base. I tried to finish one whole wall with it (what you see in the photo above) as I knew that I might not get an exact match when I asked them to make up some more. It turns out I was right, the first color had more orange in it than the second batch, which was more of a pure gold. So I had to repaint the one wall all over so it wouldn't look wierd. But, since I'm going to add washes over it anyway, I let some of the first color show through the second coat. It was subtle but nice and I figured it was like getting a head start on the shading.

The irony that I was painting my old smudgy walls in order to create a clean surface so that I can then create the look of "old smudgy walls" was not lost on me. I've been so excited to get to this point and now, staring at all the freshly painted walls, it's intimidating to think of "messing it all up".

So far today I've been busy with dog issues and now I have a few other tasks to check off my list before I can get back to the painting. Hopefully I'll rally later this afternoon and, deep breath, start "messing it up".