A fresh coat of paint

The blog has been quiet for a while and that is because I have begun redecorating. In the past this has usually been as stressful as actually moving into a different house, probably because I am made uncomfortably aware of just how much stuff I own. The fact that I have to go to the effort of emptying most of the contents of one room into another that is already full thanks very much is bad enough (twenty-six houseplants in one room). I then have to live with the interesting smells, debris and unexpected results that go with the process. On the plus side it does make me more inclined to part with at least a small proportion of the clutter I regarded as too precious to ditch the last time. What a difference seven years makes.

I have learned to treat redecorating as an activity that requires almost military planning (proper preparation and planning prevents poor performance and all that).
1. Clear room.
2. Cover floor and anything not to be painted
3. Fill and sand down where necessary.
4. Wash walls and wood work.
5. Paint ceiling. Twice.
6. Paint walls. Twice.
7. Paint woodwork. Twice if absolutely necessary and completely unavoidable.

Sounds good but in practice it takes longer to move things out than I thought it would and I keep rediscovering magazines and waste time looking at them. In the past I’ve remembered to save up newspapers weeks ahead but somehow I ended up having to look for them and there is always one little bit left uncovered (that is unavoidably on show) that received a fine spray of emulsion when the ceiling was painted. Of course you don’t know this until you put everything back in place.

The Attached One got lots of brownie points for discovering sugar soap in liquid form as something I wasn’t looking forward to was getting the powdered stuff to dissolve. I suspect I ought to wash and rinse one wall at a time rather than work my way around the whole room and then begin rinsing. I must lead a charmed life as, thus far, I have not managed to soak any plug sockets and electrocute myself. I sometimes wonder what would actually happen if I didn’t rinse after using sugar soap, would the walls start to dissolve? Just how dangerous is this stuff? How quickly should I wipe those drips off my arms?

When it came to the actual painting we thought we might save time and effort by acquiring a Dulux Paint Pod, a product that has been heavily promoted on TV. As we are planning to redecorate the whole house we felt it would be a worthwhile investment, even though it was going to restrict us to quite a limited and “safe” range of colours because it requires special packs of paint. Unfortunately it has turned out to be an expensive disappointment.


It comes with a very dinky brush designed for “cutting in” the corners but as the Paint Pod roller can’t go into corners without scraping the paint off the adjoining wall you really need to use a wider brush for that part of the job. The instructions warn you not to press the button too often in case too much paint comes out. In my experience not enough paint came out no matter how often I pressed it so I had to keep pressing it and put up with the really irritating noise that accompanied it. In order to paint the ceiling we also invested in the “extra reach handle” (another £10) but this made it too heavy and unstable for me to use.

In the past I have been able to tackle the painting myself but after a day with the Paint Pod I had to get The Attached One to paint the ceiling and put a second coat on the walls. The whining noise and the weight of the very small roller left me feeling shattered and he wasn’t in much better shape afterwards either. We have now dug out the old fashioned good quality rollers and brushes that we have used many times before and feel that, for the kind of result we expect, that is what is required. The Paint Pod roller is less shaggy than the ones we would normally use, probably to make it easier for the system to clean it but we still had to put it through twice. We also had to pull it apart to get rid of all the water.


I have refused to use it again so he will be painting the bedroom the fetching shade of pale yellow that was intended for the hall/staircase but we just can’t face the prospect of his reaching up that high while on a ladder and avoiding entangling himself with two cables. Especially if he has to keep getting down to reconnect it. Not using the Pod means that we can now use any paint we want in any colour we want so we are going to live dangerously and paint the staircase a golden yellow. I prefer to have the walls and woodwork the same colour but this has not gone down well with my other half. We have a lot of pictures and I don’t want them to have to compete with what is around them, including the patchwork effect of walls one colour, woodwork another.

At the moment I am just pleased that we have agreed on the choice of a colour for one of the rooms downstairs. It opens onto the garden and is quite gloomy, north-facing, so we needed something that would brighten it up. “Melon Sorbet” looks better than it sounds and will act as a good back drop for the pictures we want to put in there. We have been drooling over a new concept in home decor, the photographic wall mural, big enough to fill most of an average wall. We quite fancy the idea of having a window on a forest facing the window on the garden.


I am absolutely determined to get the whole house decorated in one go and reach a level of completion and tidiness that has so far proved a distant dream. Goodbye carpets, hello laminated wood floors. New clean curtains. Actually putting those pictures it cost so much to frame on the walls. In a way it has been another way of saying farewell to our late lamented moggy, whose fur I keep finding on the yellowing tape on cardboard boxes. He wasn’t impressed the last time we did this with the consequence that we never did it again while he was alive. There was a real danger that, having used gloss paint on the woodwork in the hall, he would rub up against it and then try licking it off. That night we shut him and ourselves into the bedroom along with his food bowls and litter tray. And spent all night awake while he ate biscuits noisily and thought about using his litter tray. Noisily.

Hopefully we will be able to avoid having to do this again for some time but it does get a bit easier with experience. I enjoy fantasising about painting a room purple and the choice of colours is far greater than it was when my parents had to opt for magnolia. At least this time I have managed to get started during the summer. The last time I did this there was a breaking news report on the radio about planes crashing into a building in New York and we were obliged to leave the windows open because of the smell, even though it suddenly seemed a bit too cold for September.