Painting: bedrooms 2 and 3

Having just laid, then carefully oiled the new oak flooring in the spare bedrooms, we then proceeded to cover it all up with grubby cardboard and dustsheets in order to paint the rooms - gah! Ideally we would have painted all the walls before fitting the flooring, but thanks to having to correct the manufacturing faults in the Fermacell boards, there simply wasn't time.

The ripples we'd discovered in ALL our Fermacell boards meant that once again we had to reapply several layers of FST (fine surface treatment - a kind of plaster skim coat) before painting the walls. We cursed all the (many) extra hours of work this cost us, though also took some comfort from the fact that the compensation payments essentially paid for all the oak flooring in the house. After many late nights trowelling, smoothing and sanding walls, even that compensation began to seem like a poor trade off... Re-doing jobs that you thought you'd already completed, is definitely one of the worst things about house-building.

Bedroom 3 walls re-done and ready for painting.

The walls needed to be really smooth in bedroom 3 because the darker colour we were using ('Rolling Fog Dark') would magnify any flaws much more than white. 

Once again we used Little Greene's intelligent (washable) matt which had proved pretty resilient in the hallway when bashed (repeatedly) by tradesmen. (Note to future self: wait until all the trades have gone before painting anything if you can possibly help it...) 

After seeing the walls white for so many months, the room looked completely different when we added a colour, especially a bold one like this.

Once the two coats had been painted the darker shade really seemed to suit the north-facing bedroom, making it feel much warmer and cosier than the stark white undercoat. (It's hard to tell from the photos, but it looks much warmer in reality).

We waited until the paint had fully dried, then carefully refitted all the switches and sockets. It's a bit of a pain having to undo them all in order to paint behind, but the clean finish it produces does make all that fiddling around worthwhile.

 

With bedroom 3 painted, we moved on to bedroom 2. As ever, we'd spent much time reapplying that accursed FST to all the walls, before sockets were undone and wrapped in polythene bags to avoid any paint drips. It's a nice feeling when you've finished all the prep and you're finally ready to paint.

Throughout the house we'd used natural shades to reflect what was going on outside the windows. Bedroom 2 looked directly into the treetops so it felt like it really should be green. We chose Little Greene's 'Eau de Nil', a slightly lighter and brighter shade than the 'Kitchen Green' we'd used in the lounge.

 

The site inspector looked distinctly unimpressed with our choice of colour.

 

The bare, wintry branches outside the window don't really illustrate how the green of the room is supposed to mirror what's outside...  

... but fast-forward a few months and the view outside is rather more like it.