I have finally finished painting the bedrooms. I am very frustrated at myself for taking as long as I have, but at least I am finally done painting the bedrooms.

Originally we were going to paint everything in the colour “white shadow”, which you can see on the walls above. That would have included the door frames and the window frames, basically all the trim painted in the same colour as the walls.

After we put the colour on the walls, with the white base coat on the trim, we decided to paint an acrylic gloss white for all the trim and the doors, with white shadow on the walls. We are quite happy with the results in the bedrooms.

We did all the main bedroom doors in the same gloss white as the frames above. With the closet doors to the two built in robes we painted the trim the gloss white, but then painted the doors a semi-gloss white shadow (as on the left). I reckon that it looks pretty good as well, and should look great over the carpet once that is installed and the hardware is then put on the doors.

I’m still working on painting the hallway. We are going with the same style as the bedrooms, with the white trim and “white shadow” walls. Unfortunately I had some trouble with my final coat of paint on the cornices on the ceiling. The paint must of been off because my “flat” white ceiling paint when on glossy in places. I tried to cover it with some new flat white ceiling paint, but the gloss continued to shine through.

I have now had to reseal the cornice and have just tonight finished my second coat of Taubmans One Coat Ceiling paint. I am not sure if it has worked yet though, as the tint of white seems darker than the rest of the ceiling paint. I really hope that it’s because it’s wet, otherwise I have no idea what I am going to do about it. There is already 8 – coats on paint on the cornice now …

I had my friend Ryan Booker over this weekend to help me with some of the painting under the house. I was extremely grateful for Ryan’s help this weekend, but like I said, my friend Ryan really annoys me.

I’ve known Ryan for about 9-years now and he is a pretty good friend. He is leading our current YWAM DTS at Reef to Outback and is newly married. But sometimes I get really frustrated being around him.

This weekend when he came over to help was one of these times that I got annoyed. You see, Ryan is a sign writer by trade and is very good at painting. So what really annoyed me this weekend was that in the time it took me to almost complete a coat of paint on the trim of one bedroom, Ryan completed three coats of paint on another virtually identical bedroom.

So I’m guess I am not actually annoyed at Ryan. I am actually more annoyed at myself…

About six weeks ago I took a week off to paint, thinking that I would be able to finish most of it that week. Well, I didn’t even finish the undercoat that first week, it took me three weeks to do the prep and undercoat!

Well, I’ve continued to paint in the evenings and weekends and here is a floor plan update of how far I’ve gotten with the painting …

As you can see, nothing is finished yet, but we are making progress. I just had a few friends over this morning, which was a huge help. Hopefully I can pull some more help together in the coming weeks and eventually get it done.

The room that has nothing done is the garage, and it isn’t a high priority. I don’t think that my parent’s garage ever got painted, despite living there for over 20-years now.

Well, it only took me three weeks, but I finally completed the paint undercoat for under our house. In the words of our builder “It’s a real s#*t job!”.

When I took time of work to paint it took me about 4-days of full time work preparing before I could even start painting. This involved a lot of putty, no-more-gap (calking), scraping and sanding. It felt like every door had nearly 100 holes to putty, scrape and sand.

Now that the undercoat is finally finished I’ll be working on the ceiling paint first. It’ll be a basic flat white ceiling paint, which I hope I can get done within the next two weeks of evening painting.

I am taking this week off to paint under the house. The plastering is complete, so now it’s up to me to paint before the tiling in finished and the carpets are put in.

There are four bedrooms, a hallway, an ensuite and a toilet to prepare and paint in a week. In the middle of day two I have dusted off most of the walls and done all the caulking (no-more-gap) and puttying. Tamara’s Dad is helping again as right now he is sanding down the putty.

Tonight (second shift / day 2) I should be able to start sealing the plasterboard with the white primer.

I’ll try to give an update later in the week with how it’s going. I’ve got a bunch of mates coming hopefully on Friday to help, so that will help to get it done by the end of this weekend.

By the end of the weekend I will definitely need a bit of a break.

Technorati Tags: painting

Since we finally completed the paint preparation on our Queenslander we are now able to start testing the paint colours.

The top floor or our Queenslander has powder coated aluminium siding. Although it is possible to paint over the aluminium siding, we decided it would be best if we matched the colour from the top floor to the paint that we were to purchase for the ground floor.

Although you can’t see too much of the top floor siding in the photo, you can see a bit of the siding in the top left corner of the photo.

The paint that we chose doesn’t actually have a name, only a formula (if you really want to know it I can get it for you, just leave a comment). I took in a piece of the top floor siding to Bunnings and they were able to match the colour for us using their paint computers. As you can see from the photo, the paint colour match came up pretty well.

The finish on the paint is a bit different from the top floor siding. The top floor siding has sort of a semi-gloss finish to it, while the ground floor paint is only available in a gloss finish, or a low-sheen finish. We have decided on the low-sheen finish paint for the house, and it looks pretty good in the little bit that we have done so far.

For the paint type we chose Taubmans SunProof Max Low Sheen paint. It has a 12 year guarantee against peeling, flaking and blistering, which is a nice piece of mind to have.

I also picked up two new paint brushes to apply the paint to the timber cladding with. I bought some big 100mm brushes that should speed up the application of the paint.

Technorati Tags: painting, queenslander, paint colours

When our Builder here in Townsville put the timber cladding on the house they used a heck of a lot of nails. Although the timber weatherboard cladding came pre-primed, we still had to prepare the cladding prior to painting.

It was a five step process to prepare the timber cladding for painting.

1. Putty over all the nail holes and large knot holes
2. Scrape back the putty after it has dried
3. Sand the putty so that it is flush with the timber cladding
4. Use a flexible gap filler (like No More Gaps) to fill in the cracks. These cracks were where the different timber cladding boards met, at the corners and around the door frames.
5. Apply a primer over the putty to seal it.

If you have a look at the photos you can get an idea for how much work it actually took to prepare the timber cladding for painting.

Tamara’s dad ended up doing the majority of the work (Thanks Ken), and I worked mostly on the weekends. It took us a few weeks to get it done, but finally we are now ready to paint the timber cladding.

Technorati Tags: painting, timber cladding, weatherboard