Painting Baby Gutzmer's Room 2 of 3

Painting Baby G’s room 2 of 3

If any of your friends have striped a room you’ve already heard the horror stories. It is substantially more difficult and time consuming than just painting. There are numerous things that you can mess up that will make things infinitely more difficult. OK, So you’ve heard the warnings of your friends who’ve tried, you realize the work, and you still want to try the stripes. Here you go.

First a note on colors and types of paint, I highly recommend picking the color you like and then picking a color one lighter on the card. Some people I know have decided to do the same color in semi-gloss and flat. They have all regretted this, as the flat paint is ridiculously difficult to clean. If it is a child’s room satin is a good easy to clean choice. If it is a kitchen or bathroom you could bump it up to semi gloss, but its your room so pick whatever you want.

Pre Requisite: Painting Baby G’s room 1 of 3

1) Planning Planning Plannnig
Here an ounce of planning can save you hour of difficult painting. First of all measure all of your walls, doors and, windows and make a little diagram. Now, since you have already painted your base coat you will want to avoid repainting all of the suckiest parts. A standard paint roller is 9” wide, so if you make your stripes 9 – 10” wide they will be the perfect width to hit with one pass of a roller.

So your goals here:
-Have the corners lie in the middle of a stripe. If you do not have to add more trim at the corners that would be great
-Minimize the number of corners you have to repaint.
-Minimize the trim you have to do
Use your diagram and mark out where the stripes will be, trust me it seems like extra work but it will pay off in then end.

EG: Baby G’s room had 5 internal corners, 2 of which had door trim an inch away. I avoided all of those but 1, and that one had >3 inches on either side of the corner making is suitable for the small roller. I did have to sacrifice and repaint the trim between the doors.
2) Taping Taping Taping
I used the blue tape (it was on sale), but they also had some green tape that was supposed to make cleaner lines, more on that later. I would not recommend the beige tape, but I would recommend shelling out the extra money for the wide tape. I used the 1” tape which was kind of narrow.

Get your measuring tape and start measuring out the distances you have carefully planned. After you have a couple marked, take a tack and stick it in one of the marks. Now you can just hook the end of your tape on and mark away. As you are marking put a small x in the sections that you are planning on repainting. If you are using 10” stripes the math should be pretty easy. If you are using 9” stripes just remember that all of the digits of multiples of 9 add up to 9. ie 27 => 2+7=9 also you can just increment the 10s and decrement the 1s. Or just learn your damn multiplication tables.

Once you have the top of the wall marked go back and mark the bottom in the same way. You may be tempted to use a plumb line to just make the lines as vertical as possible. You shouldn’t.

Brief aside about visual acuity and statistical tolerancing:
The human eye is very good at determining if lines are parallel, but not as good at determining if they are vertical. So as you are making your lines and you are shooting for It is much better if you are off like / / / instead of / \ /. Now what this means to you. If you use a level of a plum line any error would be random and you would be more likely to end up with the dreaded / \ /. By contrast if you measure uniform increments from the wall even if you have the same quantity of error it will be virtually unnoticeable on the wall.

e.g: On one wall I miss measured the bottom lines and was off by a whole inch from the top lines. The only reason I noticed the one set of lines that were /, the rest of the lines were virtually unnoticeable.

3) Double check all the lines
OK last chance. Take a good hard look at each line. Make sure your x’s all alternate properly. take a good look at each line. Here is a good time to use your plumb line. Once you start painting it is too late.

4) Set lines
One of the major pitfalls of masking tape is feathering. If there are any small gaps between the tape and the wall the paint will wic under the tape creating a feathering effect along the edges that you don’t want. The easiest solution is to use a hard rubber roller to make sure all of the tape is adhered firmly to the wall.

5) Now for the painting
And by now you should be old hat at this. If not, see painting baby Gutzmer’s room 1 of 3, step 6 – 10. Everything should still be clean from the first time and you have already done your masking. So:
Prep

Cut-in

Roll it up

Repeat

6) Remove the tape and admire your handy work / notice your mistakes
Now for the fun part (according to Cara) Grab the tape and gently but firmly pull it away at a 30 deg (pi/6) angle from the wall and from the line. It should come away cleanly without peeling any paint. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

7) Touchup
Grab your brush again and carefully go around and find all of the many small imperfections that fill your heart with shame. Go over it once with the light color and once with the dark color. If you did not have anything to touchup congratulations you’re a better man than I.

8) Admire your handy work
It’s been a lot of time and a lot of effort, now time to show all of your friends, take some pictures, write a blog?

nice sharp lines

Painting Baby Gutzmer's Room 1 of 3

Painting Baby Gutzmer's Room 1 of 3

As Baby Gutzmer approaches I have been informed that it is time for the oldest of baby traditions, painting the baby room. This goes all the way back to a conversation overheard in an early cave.

♂How do you want to decorate the baby's room.
♀I don't know I was thinking of a nice gender neutral green
♂That seems kind of bland
♀maybe some two tone green stripes
♂I was thinking of a mural of me and my friends hinting and killing some buffalo
♀I think I would prefer the stripes
Club... thump

and so the first baby mural was created

I lacking a club ended up settling on the 2 tone green stripes.
So please to enjoy the first of my 3 part series "Painting baby Gutzmers room"

1) Move the furniture out of the way. Seems easy enough. Get it out of the room or away from the walls there should be 4ft of clearance around.

2) Take off all of those faceplates. You could mask them, but it is way easier and cleaner to remove them, and as I'll investigate later masking is not all it is cracked up to be.

3) Clean... Clean... Clean

If you want the paint to be nice and smooth and not to peel off in a year you want to start with a surface that is nice and smooth and CLEAN.

Start with a broom sweep the whole thing paying special attention to the cobwebs that you did not even notice were there.
Now get your favorite bucket and make a dilute cleaning solution with your favorite household cleaner. Make sure it is not too strong you do not want to leave any residue. Take a rag and get it slightly damp and wipe down the entire wall. If your walls were immaculate to start with congratulations, you are the cleanest person I know.

If you are a little anal like me you can do an additional quick rub down with a scouring pad. I like the giant ones they sell at sams. Especially if you are starting with a semi-gloss or high gloss, this will scarify the surface to allow for better adhesion.
Oh, and keep that rag and bucket around, it will come in handy

4) Masking (optional)
This is the point in the painting process where you break out multiple rolls of tape and go to town coating every inch of your trim... right? Maybe not. Lets consider the pros and cons
Cons
-All that time and effort to put the tape everywhere
-Once the tape is on you tend to get sloppy since that's what its there for
-Feathering (the little bit of paint that wick under the tape and get on the trim anyway)
Pros
-?

With a good brush and a steady hand you can get just as strait (or better) trim lines with out all of the taping, but more on that later. I do like the tape for the trip that is close together or where it is really close to an inside corner, and there is not enough room to maneuver a brush. The easiest way is to get it even at one side and then to pull it strait and line it up at the other side, smooth it down tight and if IF the wall is straight the tape will be perfect.
5) Put down a drop cloth
It doesn't need to be fancy that old sheet set will do just fine, but it does need to be there. No matter how careful you are sooner or later a drop will fall, and if it is on carped it is not easy to clean. If you want to shell out $8 for a real drop cloth it is worth it.
6) Now use those free pint stirrers you got to stir it up nice.
When you are done wipe them on the rim as you pull it out, now you don't have AS much paint dripping on all of the news paper you laid out. You did lay news paper out right?
7) Pick your worst bowl, Tupperware, margarine container and dump some in (carefully)
or $0.89 for the pro container with the wipe off wire.
8) Cutting in
Ok, I promised you deliverance from all of that masking and here it is. Professional painters don't mask and neither should you. And your brush will set you free. First of all throw away that $1 brush with the plastic bristles that are always falling out.

If you want to do a good job start with a good brush. Look for good bristles that are split at the ends, a nice chiseled edge that will let the bristles fan out as you pull it across the wall, and a solid mounting and handle. You don't need to go crazy but if you spend $8 in 6 years, you will be glad you did.

Dip your brush into the paint about a half an inch as you go the paint will slowly creep up the brush, but keep it as close to the bottom as possible. Wipe off the excess, and get ready to paint. Start 1/2 in away from the edge and slowly pull the brush into and across the trim. As you do the bristles will fan out into a knife like edge (hence cutting in). keep going until the edge is just touching the trim, and move it straight down the edge.
Congratulations! a nice clean edge with no tape and half the time.
Oh and make sure you still have that bucket and damp rag around just in case.

9) Once you have the trim "cut in" turn the brush 90 deg and get a good couple of inches to make room for the rollers. If there is not room for the roller, then use the brush for as far as you need.

Now that you have about 1% of the wall covered you are home free. 90% of the work is done, and it is time to bust out that roller. Pour the paint in the roller pan and load up the roller. Make sure you roll out the excess on the pan, and head to the wall. Start with one big W (or M for the democrats) and then keep moving back and forth in the same pattern until the the area is completely covered. The key here is to press firmly into the wall. Use a little paint and apply it evenly.

One roller should look about like this. Get as close as you safely can to the edges since the paint from the roller really looks a lot nice.

10) Repeat steps 8 and 9

But good news. don't really worry about getting right up to the trim. As long as you're within an 1/8 - 1/4 in that's close enough. It should go twice as fast.

11) Cleaning Cleaning Cleaning

Now that you're done spend 20 min to clean all of your tools. Rinse the brush thoroughly and soak it in some warm water. If the paint is dried on you can use a wire brush to clean the... brush. The rest you should be able to rinse out with a garden hose. I do usually just throw away the roller, I have tried reusing them and they always seem worthless the second time no matter how much I clean them.

Now that We've got the base coat down we're ready for the stripes.