Painting the kitchen

I like painting walls. It seems a strange thing to like, but whenever I set about painting a room something funny happens. So recently we have had plasterers in, which was confusing for me when I stumbled downstairs in my pjs to find strange men in the kitchen, but I remembered why they were there fairly quickly, made a cup of tea, and left them to it. So now we have nicely plastered walls in the kitchen. Hooray! Time for paint.

When painting new plaster you have to put on a base coat, with lots of water in it, so that the plaster can absorb the water and then won’t absorb the actual paint when you put it on. It’s fairly simple really. Rather than buying crazy expensive base coat, you can buy cheap white paint, water it down by half, and get with the painting. Saves money in the long run. The first time we (mum and I) tried this it was a disaster. The paint had gone off and it was all lumpy like cottage cheese, and when we tried to water it down and put it inside the special roller that smooshes (yes this is now a word, live with it) it out onto the walls it didn’t work. What ended up happening was us slipping with the special roller and pouring about a pint of cottage cheese paint on the carpet. Thankfully, our carpet is old and grey and with the help of a tea towel you can hardly see it now. It still rendered both mum and I useless from giggles for about 5 minutes because somehow we had poured paint everywhere.

Time to get new paint. This would have been easy if the car wasn’t away being fixed. So we had to go to my grandmothers, borrow her car, take that to B&Q, buy paint, come home, and try again. During all of this the MOT place called and said that mum’s car was ready to be picked up. It took the best part of an hour to buy paint in the end. Once we got home it was easy to water down the paint and start working. The first job was painting around the light fittings on the ceiling, with runny paint this is harder than it sounds and within about 5 minutes I was in a giggle fit again with paint running all the way down my arm and into my armpits. It was very VERY cold. I had started, so I was determined to carry on, but by the time I was done it looked like I’d been attacked by a toddler art session. There may well have been more paint on me than on the ceiling at that point. So I decided to move to the walls.

This is where we discover that I am not good at using a roller. Getting paint even on a wall is actually quite hard. Lesson from today, I’m not good at painting...but it’s still a lot of fun.