Painting Fun

Since now in retrospect, I can laugh about this, I'll tell you a little story about our painting experience over the Easter weekend. So, we decided that since Micah will have to share a room with Amber, that their room should really represent both of them. Previously the room had all lavender walls with white trim. And as the room was filled with baby dolls, doll accessories, and everything else that comes with a three year old girl; we decided that we needed some masculinity in the room. So, I broke out the scrapbook paper to find the perfect color to complement the purple and came up with a nice "lime-like" green color and decided we'd paint an accent wall right behind where the crib would be placed. Being the energetic person that I am, I decided that we'd put Amber to bed in her sleeping bag downstairs on Friday night and we'd go ahead and paint the wall. I sent hubby to the store to get a quart of green mixed and I got everything ready to paint.


Well, apparently the nice person who mixed the paint didn't bother to tell him that the lid was not on very tight. So, I carried the paint upstairs and sent him to get the rest of the brushes and rollers from downstairs. While he was doing this, I decided to finish moving everything around in the room and was getting ready to paint when all of the sudden, I apparently bumped the paint to find that indeed, the lid was NOT on very tight and we all of the sudden had green carpet, a radiator and closet doors. Now mind you, the closet doors were white, the radiator was whitish, and the carpet was shades of gray. So with the window wide open, I said a few choice words that I will not even post on here. (I'm sure the neighbors enjoyed my display of CHRISTIAN behavior! Needless to say, we won't be knocking on their door to witness any time soon.)

After saying a few words and realizing that this was NOT going to clean up the mess, I screamed for Josh to come up and help clean up. He then ran for like every old rag and roll of paper towels we had in the house and we spent the next two hours, at least, trying to soak up all the paint. Of course, since I being the brilliant one that I am had decided to paint in the evening, Home Depot was already closed and no one was open who provided carpet cleaning equipment rentals. So Josh called my parents and ran over to borrow their wet vac. This helped a bit and we basically scrubbed and soaked the carpet for another like two or three hours. Finally in disgust, we went to bed with the carpet still wet.

When awaking to find that the carpet was still of a greenish hue, we decided a carpet cleaner was in order. So Josh went to get one from Home Depot and I perused the adds online for new carpet. At this point we were pretty sure that we were not only losing part of our deposit but that we were doomed to enjoy greenish carpet for the remainder of our time in this house.

But, we persevered anyways and hubby was able to run the carpet cleaner about five times over after repeated scrubbing and amazingly, the paint kept coming out. By about 1 or 2 in the afternoon on Saturday, we had very wet but much cleaner carpet. I used some handy nail polish remover and some rubbing alcohol and was able to scrub most of the radiator and also to wipe off Amber's chair and some places on her bed since they were not porous in texture. This worked wonders and slowly we had the room almost back to normal.

So in the end, you are probably wondering, did I still decide to paint a wall or did I just let everything go? Well, I being the never -ending decorator, decided we would still paint the wall. I now also had to repaint he closet doors. SO, Josh got the privilege of running to Home Depot yet again to pick up another quart of green. We unearthed the leftover white paint we had in the basement and I repainted the doors. Then we moved everything over across the room, yet again, and painted the wall green. I must say that after all of this, the room isn't looking too bad.

After cleaning up the drop clothes and hammering on the lid to all paint, we slowly moved everything back to the original spots. So most of the green in the room is now on the wall, Amber is minus a few stuffed animals that got splashed, and we now (how ironic) have a PRINCESS blanket covering up the cover on Amber's chair.

I'll post a few pictures of the room, though I haven't hung the five pictures above the crib or the letters for Micah's name yet. You'll notice the colors of the room are probably a bit off in the pictures but the colors of the room are now pink, purple, lime, and aqua. All of the colors are picked up in Amber's comforter. Micah's crib sheets (though you won't see them in the pictures) are white, aqua and one with trees that looks very much like it goes with the Winnie the Pooh theme in the room right now. The stuffed animals for him have been moved to the net beside the crib and Amber's are in the net above her bed. You'll notice that there are A LOT of them in the pictures.



What did I learn from this? #1 Always make sure the paint has the lid hammered on, even if it just came from the store. #2 Paint is not really permanent until it dries.