With a lot of dusty work still going on in the house, we hadn't planned on painting the walls until much later, but our new staircase would be arriving (relatively) soon so it made sense to get the stairwell area painted before that was fitted.
Once the stairs are in, it will be much harder to reach the upper areas of the walls, plus the cut-string design of the staircase meant painting around it could be very tricky. And since we would be painting the stairwell, we decided to paint the hall and landing at the same time.
We spent some time choosing the type and colour of paint we would be using and eventually decided on Little Greene's 'French Grey'. Since the hall and landing would be high traffic areas, we chose to use their 'Intelligent Matt', a flat matt finish that claims to be hard-wearing and scrubbable.
We haven't used any coving in the house, which was going to make it harder when painting the corners where the wall meets the ceiling. Getting a perfectly straight line using a brush would take us far too long, so we decided to try out one of these paint edgers. They do take a bit of practice to get right, but once you've figured out how much paint to load and how hard to press, the results were pretty good and certainly much quicker than painting by hand.
Speed is quite important when cutting-in, because you are trying to maintain 'wet edges' to avoid any visible sheen lines that can occur where the brushed edges and rolled walls meet.
Although the whole house had already been painted with an undercoat of white emulsion, there was still plenty of preparation needed. The lights, sockets and switches all had to be removed, any small nicks or bumps filled and the walls all lightly-sanded and cleaned down.
Here's the upstairs landing prepped ready for the first coat of French Grey...
... and here it is after the first coat. We were impressed with the quality and consistency of the Little Greene paint, which seemed much better than other 'posh paints' we'd used in the past.
Painting the high edges at the top of the stairwell was a bit hair-raising, but would have been far more difficult once the stairs are in.
Although slightly darker than the stark, all-white look of the undercoat, the grey paint seemed to reveal lots of shadows and contrasts that gave the rooms a much warmer character.
All the work we put in finishing the walls seemed to pay off; the joins between the Fermacell boards seemed hidden and the walls looked as smooth as if they'd been plastered. Perhaps all those many, many hours grappling with Fermacell instead of getting in a plasterer had proved worthwhile after all? (Or perhaps not - more on that later...)
Once the second coat of paint had fully dried, we could refit all the sockets, switches and lights.
While the rollers and brushes were still wet, we decided to paint the utility room too.
More prep required; switches and sockets were undone and pulled away from the wall (just enough to allow a mini-roller behind) then any unevenness in the undercoated walls (such as paint drips) were removed by gently sanding everything down. This was much easier and quicker using a large hand-sander.
Before.
After.
Before.
After.
This paint is not cheap so we saved a bit of money by not painting any areas that would be covered by kitchen cabinets.
Once the paint had dried and all the wall lights had been refitted, an unexpected problem cropped up.
Everything had seemed perfect in daylight; the walls looked and felt absolutely smooth, however that all changed at night...
That same wall in the evening showed loads of horizontal shadows above and below the light. At first we thought it was just the light fitting creating the lines, but after much investigation it turned out that it was actually a manufacturing fault with the Fermacell boards. (Noooooo!)
As part of the production process the Fermacell boards are sanded down, however sometimes the sanding drum can bounce and that causes these 'ladder lines' to be created. They are completely invisible during the day, so of course we never noticed them.
And the next question was, how many other boards had been affected... ?
... the answer was pretty much every single board in the house had the same ladder lines! (Noooo again!). We had been sold a batch of boards that frankly should have been chucked in the skip. Even worse, we had spent months carrying, cutting, fitting, shaping, jointing and smoothing them, only to find that once illuminated with wall-lights they were all showing these dreadful 'ladder lines'. We were not happy.
Looking up at the light above the stairwell - the photograph doesn't show the ladder lines...
... but the same light photographed from the landing shows the extent of the ladder lines.
We went around shining a wander lead across all the walls in the house and there were ladder lines everywhere. It was so depressing.
Fermacell to their credit did (sort of) try to help.
Their offer to supply us with new boards was no use because we weren't about to rip down all the boards we had spent months fitting. We then suggested they send over some of their expert fitters to put it right (i.e., effectively plaster over all the boards - boards that ironically are sold as specifically not-needing plastering) but they didn't seem too keen on that, suggesting that their fitters only did commercial properties, not domestic.
Ultimately, after six months of teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling (and almost daily phone calls to Fermacell), we did finally reach an agreement for compensation. We really didn't want the money; we'd rather someone had just come and put it right, because we still had the headache of trying to work out exactly how we were going to fix this mess...
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