Painting: Main bedroom

We'd finished laying the engineered oak in the 1st floor landing, but before continuing the floor boards through to the main bedroom, we thought we'd better get it painted first.

It made much more sense to get all the painting done before laying the brand new boards. The high vaulted ceiling meant we'd be doing a lot of work from ladders so any new floor would have to be very well protected to avoid any scratches, dents or paint spatters.

As before, the manufacturing fault we'd discovered with the Fermacell boards, severely delayed our progress. All the walls had to be 'plastered' again (several times) with Fine Surface Treatment, then sanded down (several times). And once again, we found the only way to ensure we were actually getting rid of the uneven ripples in the boards was to work by lamplight at night (usually very late at night). It was knackering and frustrating but once the rooms had been prepped and cleaned up, we were finally ready to start painting.

It would have been a lot easier to paint the walls and ceiling the same colour, but the blue we'd chosen for the walls might have made the room too dark if it continued over the large area of the vaulted ceilings. We were also concerned that dark colours might show up any raised areas from the taping and jointing so we used an off-white instead.

We had chosen Little Greene's 'Slaked Lime Mid' for all the woodwork and window reveals (it was the closest match to the colour of our window frames) so it made sense to also use it for the main bedroom ceiling.

The main bedroom is south-facing so the position of the sun can dramatically change the colour tones in the room.  

The vaulted ceilings after two coats of Slaked Lime Mid. The orange 'pine' beam in the centre of the ceiling is not going to complement the colour of the oak floor, so we will be painting that to match the ceiling at a later date.   

It's more usual to paint window reveals the same colour as the walls, however using the same shade of white as the window frames gives it a modern treatment that helps showcase the depth of the reveals and reflects more light. Another bonus was that it was easier to paint right up to the edge of the frame without showing any untidy paint lines.   

Despite their mixed reviews online, we found the paint edger worked pretty well and made the whole process a lot quicker. After using it throughout the hall and lounge, we knew how to handle all its quirks (like how to hard to press and how much paint to load it with). 

After using the edging pad to get sharp corner lines, we went in as close as possible with a mini-roller so that the texture matched that of the rest of the walls. It's important to coat the rest of the walls while the edges are still wet to avoid seeing any visible lines later.  

As ever, we used Little Greene paint for the walls - this shade is called 'Celestial Blue'.

Just as we had used a leafy green down in the lounge to reflect the predominant view of trees and fields, the large feature window in the main bedroom showed off a large sky, so blue was chosen to complement those natural tones (well, it would be blue if it wasn't for that massive cloud!)

Once the gabled walls at either end had been painted, we turned our attention to the other two walls. These were much trickier to paint because the line where the vaulted ceiling met the wall wasn't perfectly straight (that section of the roof had been 'handbuilt' so the timbers hadn't been perfectly aligned). 

If we just painted right up to the edge, the top of the wall would have looked wonky, so we used a laser to mark out a perfectly level line, then painted carefully (by hand) up to that. The blue line actually goes up onto the ceiling in certain areas, but because it's level overall, it looks perfectly straight. 

Same issue with the wall on the other side, but once again the laser line seemed to work well. 

We hung plastic over the door to stop moisture affecting the new oak boards just outside in the landing. We'd bought a humidity meter to check the conditions were good for fitting the oak and it was amazing to see how much moisture was being generated in the house just by painting one room. 

Once we'd finished the second coat of paint and refitted all the switches, sockets and lights, the oak floor could finally be laid in the main bedroom.