Moving forward – slowly

When I checked how the paint spraying had gone yesterday the first thing I noticed was that although most of the walls were OK, parts of them were very patchy. This was partly due to my reluctance to overload the surfaces and get runs but was also due to occasional uneven spraying, possibly due to the jet becoming slightly blocked and delivering more paint in parts of its arc than others.

The professionals would probably have just started the machine up again and given the walls another coat but I couldn’t do that because (a) I don’t have enough paint and (b) I couldn’t face doing it over again what with all the mess and cleaning up afterwards. So I decided to just go round with a large soft paintbrush and see how it would come out.

In fact it looked OK as shown by the following shots taken after I’d removed the masking from around the coving.

Getting the masking off was actually very tricky. This was because the Olive Green paint that I’d bought from Brico-Depot isn’t actually a paint in the traditional sense. It actually dries into a very thin plastic film which is great on the exposed flat surfaces as it’s hard-wearing and washable even. However, it’s very vulnerable at its edges, in this case where it interfaced with the edge of the masking tape.

Consequently until I realised that and tried to find a way to avoid it, pulling the masking tape off in the usual way brought the edge of the film off with it in some places, sometimes in lengths of several centimetres, which will need repair work. If I’d known this I’d never have used it but it’s too late now and that horse has left the stable.

I’ll probably leave that until after I’ve painted the ceiling as that will require masking along the top of the green paint below the coving and although I won’t be using exactly identical masking tape, it’ll be similar and could result in yet more damage when it’s removed. To say that I never thought that painting the living room and corridor would be so challenging is a total understatement 🙁