Our money pit was already part painted when we bought it, in quite pleasant colours that suit our eclectic furniture. While I am grateful for the time saved on painting all 8 rooms (incl bathrooms and hallways), I’m a bit grumpy the painters spent no time preparing the surfaces. Already I can see where they painted over peeling surfaces and grimy areas, with our bathroom ceiling already peeling off in parts. At least sand and sugar soap, people!

Before we could move in I was determined to paint the two untouched enclosed verandahs and the toilet area. I needed to get these spaces ready so that I could teach my students in safety, comfort and with a professional look.

I chose a deep grey acrylic for the walls, bright white acrylic for the ceiling, and china white gloss enamel for the woodwork. The walls and ceiling are a buckling, unattractive masonry board and the window surrounds are an equally unattractive mish mash of poorly milled and installed 10mmx20mm timber. These areas will eventually be gutted, re-wired, insulated, replastered, and will have new windows installed, so I didn’t need to do much more than a wipe down and scrape to make them look respectable.

While I’m pretty happy with the grey, it can look a little purple in a cool light. I chose it from a Dulux sample in Bunnings, and didn’t check it in different lights. Nevertheless, it’s a cool yet warm colour and goes well with either blue or red tones, so I’m happy for now.

Here’s what the rooms looked like before, in delightful apricot (not):

Amazing what a quick paint can do, considering these look so awful.

Beautiful. Huh.

Anyway, after painting the walls and stuff, the rooms looked like this:

As you can see, the poor excuse for a skirting board hasn’t been done. And it’s still not done in parts, even though I gave parts of them an undercoat last night when I had a spare moment (the things we do just before it gets dark!). The lovely looking windows at the end are a mess of flaky, poorly applied paint, poor skirting, fluffy wood grain and lots of work required. So I’ve left them for the time being, to be tackled sometime later this year. And I’ve not yet painted the French doors because I want to lavish time and attention on them, rather than do what was done to the rest of the French doors, which is a crime of bad painting and no preparation.

So now, the rooms look more like this:

Except we now have heaps of stuff in them, including an oversupply of pillows. I wish we had the type of house where a clear expanse of verandah was possible, but no. We need all the space we can get. Darn it.