Painting a room can be a great way to give that space a new look or it can be used to start fresh on a blank canvas. Before purchasing our house we knew that we would endeavor on painting the entire house one color. The previous owners chose really bold colors on the first floor which didn’t match well with our style.
On the second floor we also faced similar color choices, though more muted because they were bedrooms. For us we felt that choosing a different color for each room really segmented the house room by room. As I’m writing this 2 years after we painted everything white, we did end up adding some color in different parts of the house, but at the time it was hard for us to focus in and we wanted a fresh start.
It wasn’t easy picking between the hundreds of different shades of white, beige, grey-ge so we did some research and tried to find pictures of the paint colors IRL (insta) or side by side comparisons between some of our favorites (Here’s a link to one on Pinterest).
Long story short we decided to go with Alabaster by Sherwin Williams and for a couple of reasons.
- It’s a nice white/vanilla white, so the walls don’t look so stark white .
- This allows the trim to be a brighter white and pop over the walls
- The creamy tones it added warmth to the room overall
- We needed to buy about 15 gallons of paint which can be expensive, so this color was a good starting point for all the rooms
The tools 🔨 we used were very basic:
- Standard 9 inch paint rollers – ⅜” or ½” nap
- A mini 3 inch back roller
- 2 inch chisel trim paint brush (for cut ins on the all edges)
- Frog tape (only in some areas, we decided to paint without using tape in most rooms)
- A pole extender for the roller to reach our vaulted ceilings
- We also borrowed a ladder to reach other higher places
Linked below are some videos that helped us paint our walls properly and eventually quickly:
How to roll walls fast (this guy kills me, idk why) – We didn’t adventure out into the larger 12 inch rollers, it was just too extra. Overall the technique for speed is good.
One tip to paint over bold colored walls is to use a primer. This really does save you money with being able to apply only a few final coats of premium paint. In most rooms we were able to get away with 1 coat of primer, versus some rooms with the darker blue walls we had to use 2 coats of primer and then finished with 2 coats of alabaster. If you’re looking to save even more money you can use the app called “Raise” to buy gift cards at a discount.
We took our time and painted when we were not at our normal jobs. (Ana was working night shift at the time so she would paint in the day time before she went into work and I would paint after work.) The painting took us about a month in total. The first floor (minus the bathroom) took about a week, because we fully dedicated our time to only painting and we also wanted to start purchasing/moving in furniture, so that was a motivator. The second floor was a bit slower maybe because of necessity. Upstairs, we painted 3 spare bedrooms, hallway and a master (with vaulted ceilings). We decided to leave the bathrooms alone, because we knew eventually that we would update them.
Overall super happy with the results, Ana’s mom helped out with the first floor and really helped us push through the painting fatigue (Thanks, Mom!). Obviously we added back in color as time went along, but it’s great to start fresh with a blank canvas and live in the space for a while until you really know what style you’re going for.
Additional tip for painting, we found colors that we loved online but were brands of color that they didn’t sell at our local hardware store (Lowes), so we were able to find the color on this paint matcher site linked here and either find a color similar to it in a brand sold at Lowes or have the information needed for the paint associate to match it for us (hexcode).
Project Complete March 25, 2018