The Perils of Painting

Paint brush. Check.

Drop cloth. Check.

Carpet cleaner, soap and water. Check.

It's painting time over at my son and daughter-in-law's new place, and the two grandmothers volunteered to paint our grandchildren's rooms.

Decorating and how-to articles make painting look so simple. Why with a gallon of paint and a little elbow grease, they promise, anybody can turn boring harvest wheat beige walls into a bold, artistic statement or a calming oasis.

But there's a whole lot decorators leave out in between deciding to paint and sitting back in the La-Z-Boy enjoying another episode of "Duck Dynasty."

First there's picking out the paint color and paint finish. Sherwin-Williams has over 1,500 paint colors, including 169 warm neutrals. I'm not exactly sure what the big difference is between a warm neutral and a cold neutral or the subtle difference between powder blue or blue cruise but choosing takes hours.

There's also the choice of the type of finish – eggshell, satin, flat, or whether you want the primer mixed in with the final paint color.

Once you decide and lug home two heavy gallons of paint and all the supplies – a roller, roller pads, trays for the rollers and the trim work, a couple of paint brushes and a drop cloth – you can begin the thankless task of prepping the room.

Some people clear the room completely, but I take the lazy way out and pile all the furniture in the middle of the room and then cover the mountain with a drop cloth. I spend a lot of time climbing over and around beds and dressers but I convince myself that's the easiest route.

Once the furniture's out of the way, it's time to protect the woodwork with blue painter's tape. I used to think I had a steady hand and didn't need the tape. After years of putting on eyeliner, how hard could it be to follow a piece of baseboard and not get paint on the wall or carpet?

It's practically impossible. So I learned to use the tape, and that task takes about an hour, scooting along the baseboards and then climbing up and down the ladder to tape off the ceiling.

And let's not forget the drop cloths. Some of us think we're not going to drip any paint and skip this step. That would be a mistake because paint splatters are difficult to remove from the carpet and the tops of furniture one was too lazy to move out of the room.

Once all that preparation work is finished, then it's time to actually paint. I start by rolling paint on the wall because it's the most satisfying part of painting a room.

The new color appears immediately and you can actually see progress, unlike the painstaking job of trim work that takes forever.

Once all the painting is finally finished, it's time to clean up. I used to faithfully wash out all the rollers and pans. But when I discovered disposable pan liners, inexpensive rollers and cheap drop cloths, clean up is now a breeze.

The last step is going back and wiping up all the paint splatters, a big job for me because I drip paint on the carpet no matter how many drop cloths I use. I also splatter paint all over the ladder and my clothes, the windows and the doors.

So the next time I read an article on how easy it is to transform a room with a simple gallon of paint, I'm going to sit back in the La-Z-Boy, look at my already painted harvest wheat walls and smile.

The best paint job is the one that's already finished.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.