A Whiter Shade of White

As we are sharing all of our successes, I suppose that we should also share with you our failures, and yesterday I/we committed a doozie.

Yesterday K. was off networking, and I was left to paint the second coat and the ceiling of the living room. Only before she left, we jointly mixed the ceiling paint with some of the green (er..."Grape Leaves") that was on the wall, to attempt the nice effect that we got in the dining room. Alas, as it turns out we must not have mixed it well enough, as our hero soon found out.

So I painted the ceiling with one coat, and then ate a bit of lunch and went back to do the touch ups and a second coat in a lot of places. And the second coat was going on lighter than the dried first coat, but I attributed that to the fact that wet paint is normally lighter than dry paint. Only that wasn't the case. No, the mixed ceiling paint at the bottom of the can was much lighter -- presumably from us not mixing it so well -- something which I only realized after taking another break and realizing that it was not drying darker. So I left our ceiling about 2/3 a greenish-white with streaks and patches of a whiter greenish white. In other words, it didn't look so good.

Needless to say, I was a bit depressed about this, but luckily it was the kind of mistake that only set us back half a day or so, and this morning K. repainted the entire ceiling while I did some final touch-ups, as I couldn't bear the thought of having to redo all of my work from yesterday. The moral of this story is the moral of lots of stories about painting: make sure your paint is mixed well. Even better than you think is good enough.

But now the room looks quite nice, and pictures will soon be posted.