3 bedrooms

Is what I now have, all usable. I had to do quite a bit of ‘rearranging’ of stuff, moving materials and tools around and disposing of rubbish before I could get working on bedroom three. And when I eventually was able to, it turned into a nightmare as I’ll explain. But first a couple of pictures of the results.

Once again, the camera hasn’t quite caught the colour which has a slight dusky pink tinge to it, making it colour-coordinate exactly with the floor covering and the wall plinth. But you might like to know why it was a nightmare getting to this point, so I’ll explain.

Regular readers may recall that two plasterers were involved in finishing the internal walls and partitions in my house, covering nail heads and the joints between the plasterboard drylining sheets. I wasn’t that impressed when I first saw their work and quite honestly I’ve become less happy with what they did the more I’ve been involved in decorating over it.

Apart from areas that they missed entirely (there’s an area from floor to ceiling in the ‘cellier’ for example) it’s now evident that for much of their work they used old, dead plaster. Unlike fresh plaster straight from the pack that sets very quickly, old plaster takes much longer to cure but usually eventually does so.

Dead plaster, on the other hand, mixes with water and looks like fresh plaster even when it has dried. However, it doesn’t undergo the chemical reaction that makes it cure and becomes soft again if water or a water based material, such as paint, is applied to it. The result is that if the paint is applied using a roller, the roller’s suction removes the ‘plaster’ as it passes over the surface.

This has happened in all of the rooms in which I’ve painted using a roller and I’ve had to make good areas of both the walls and the ceilings. However, in bedroom three the areas involved were huge, both on the ceiling and the walls and especially on the coloured wall.

This is why after making the coloured wall good, it looks patchy in the above pictures. It was made worse because I achieved the colour by adding white and a dash of red to a can of beige and over the two or three days in which I did the work it was impossible to keep the mix and therefore the colour totally uniform. It will have to do however.

This is the price you end up paying by sub-contracting work out to sub-standard workers but at least now I’ll be ready for when I can expect the first visitors to stay over in my new house.