Flour Power

I’ll start of by saying that I now respect the work done by painters more than I ever did. Not that I didn’t respect their work before, but it seemed so much easier before I actually had to do it…

Yes, the experience of painting my previously pink room definitely took its toll. Every single part of painting is a huge pain in the ass! Each and every one of them:

• Choosing the paint – As a guy I can only distinguish 10, maybe 20, different colors (no, I’m not exaggerating, all guys are like this. And if you know one that knows more of them, well…), so when confronted with half a dozen shades of each of those, times at least three levels of shininess…
• Preparing the room – That starts by taking everything out of the room, to make it easier to “navigate” around it while painting and also to avoid getting paint on everything. Then comes putting masking tape wherever the wall touches stuff that’s not supposed to get paint on it (like light switches and ceiling). And don’t forget to clean the areas that are to be painted (I might have skipped this last one).
• Painting – When you’re already quite worked up, the bulk of the work begins. The walls themselves are not that hard. It’s the corners (top, bottom and sides) and the details (around windows, light switches, etc…) that are tough.
• Cleaning – Just when you think you just can’t take it anymore you still have to clean all the brushes and rollers. Be prepared to spend some time squeezing them to try and get all the paint out. (I think I would have just thrown them away if they were mine…). Cold water makes it even worse and if you do it in a bathtub your back will scream for mercy. Oh, and don’t forget to take out the masking tape.
• Moving back in – The final part is hauling everything back inside the room. This is actually the least terrible part of all, since you can already see the light at the end of the tunnel very clearly. It’s still a pain to get everything set up properly.

So, next time you decide to paint your room another color… think again. I know I won’t be doing it again unless it’s absolutely unavoidable. I’ll try to avoid renting pink rooms from now on

I really couldn’t take all that pinkness. Maybe if it wasn’t so strong, or if the stay was shorter, I could have endured. But not this way. And the pink curtains with the pink Playboy bunnies didn’t help either…

So I spent this past weekend repainting the room. I decided for a red color. Not “Benfica red”, but a darker shade of red. They call it “English Fire”.

Saying the painting process was hard is an understatement, but I’ll describe all the pains in another post, if I can get myself to write it. It started on Saturday afternoon (was supposed to start in the morning, but I couldn’t wake up early after one week of sleeping only 5 hours per night) and lasted until just a few hours ago. That included going to the shop to buy the paint, removing everything from the room, placing some masking tape, applying the first coat, waiting for it to dry, applying the second coat, waiting for it to dry while washing the brushes and the roller, removing the masking tape, and finally moving everything back inside the room. That basically meant spending the whole weekend stuck inside the house and, to make it even worse, the weather was the best since I arrived. Even the sun decided to show up…

All things considered, I still think it was worth it. I can now spend bigger amounts of time inside my room without going nuts, and it’s somehow cool to have a room that you painted yourself. Ando so, without further ado, I present you “The Room”, now in red:

Calm down, it’s just paint