painting walls

sucks. i thought painting a few walls sounded like a pretty easy job, even fun maybe. i mean i painted my old apartment bathroom pink, so i was already a pro!  boy was i so wrong.  choosing colors is difficult.  i was a color major, so i thought this would be the easiest part!  but maybe it's being a color major which is making this that much more difficult.  i'm looking for just the right color and shade, but i'm just not getting it.

after days and hours of contemplating color options, then a couple more hours of taping up all the walls so the paint would come out perfectly, (i'm a bit of a perfectionist so this probably took me way longer than it should have) i was ready to prime and paint!  several more hours later it was done... and it was awful. it was way to dark and almost unnatural looking, in a bad way.

the next morning we buy three more colors and i start to prime... again.  here's where my painting headache turned into a disaster. apparently you can't just prime over just any paint!  who knew? not me!  if paint has any kind of sheen to it, you must first sand the walls so that the primer can bond with the paint or wall. so every time i rolled over with the primer it would clump up like cottage cheese on my roller!  i had a complete paint meltdown.  here i was, sitting in the middle of the dining room on plastic wrap covered in paint balling my eyes out.  (mind you i was half delirious already from lack of sleep and the 12 hours of paint fumes from the previous day.)

what primer looks like when it's not bonding with the paint on the walls. ugh

i called my dad, the builder. he assured me it was nothing to cry about (did i also mention he's a marine?) and that whatever i had done wrong could indeed be fixed!  fixed, really?  okay, how? he told me to hire someone who knew what they were doing.  although my inflated do-it-myself ego was crushed, i knew he was right.  so the very next day we got a guy in to have a look and give us an estimate. to my surprise it was much more affordable than i thought.  now if i could only pick out the right color!

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