House Project 2: Painting

So the first project we had once we made it inside the house (apart from cleaning the place up - it was ridiculously dirty, including dead bugs everywhere and tons of construction-related dirt) was to tear down the totally awesome pineapple print wallpaper and apply a beautiful new coat of paint!

Here's what the kitchen looked like after taking the wallpaper down. This took quite some time, since it took us about 3 hours to figure out the actual technique and were hacking away at taking down little square inches of paper for about a third of the wall space. Then we discovered how it was really supposed to be done, and finished in about another 45 minutes. Yeah, that was exciting.

I absolutely love to faux paint, so we decided to try a new technique - venitian plaster. This requires a flat wall without texture, and since we had kinda torn up the drywall anyway in taking down the wallpaper, we needed to replaster everything.

This was sooo messy! Especially the sanding part. You can't really tell in this picture, but my hair was almost completely white!

Anthony picked out the color, and I was a little worried at first. I thought it was too dark.

This was also a very tedious process. You have to apply everything by hand with a small trowel. With the color and thickness of the paint, I felt like I was wiping brownie batter on my walls. It didn't taste nearly as good though.

My dad helped a ton in the painting process. He had never done any faux painting before, but he's a perfectionist like me, so I trusted his abilities :). I really wouldn't have been able to finish it all without him.

After the first coat, we were still a little worried about how it would look after we were done. It was so uneven and splotchy! I didn't want to say anything, but after it was all done, we both admitted we were quite worried throughout the entire second coat.

Here's a detailed shot of the walls after the first coat. You can really see the texture, but you can tell that its just not super pretty!

After it was done, I LOVED it! My walls look like someone smoothed some creamy milk chocolate on them! I can still just look at them and stare for hours and hours! I'm so happy with how it turned out. I could tell my dad really liked it too.

I love faux painting!!!