Living room paint — colour

The skirting boards are painted and await cutting and installation tomorrow (Monday after Easter).

We mist coated first thing Friday morning with white, matt emulsion mixed 1:1 with water then adding 1/2 cup of PVA glue per gallon. The water intercolates the new plaster‘s crystal structure and the PVA reduces the surface porosity a bit better than the paint alone would do. It took about an hour to go through the room and ceiling then about an hour and a half to chase through with the remaining mist coat for an erstwhile 2nd layer.

By Friday night at 7, we had finished the first coat of teal. Above, you see midway through that effort where Jackie’s rollers were just catching up to my cutting in.

Even without the trim or anything hung on the walls and with the floor still needing stain and varnish, this is a relaxing — dare I say, “calming” — room.

Living room paint — preparations

The first of the downstairs rooms we planned to finish (ignoring the laundry/WC) was the living room. With the fireplace and hearth, ceiling fan, and radiator installed, the next step was to plaster up the abuse all of these inflicted.

The bright yellow laundry at the far end of the ground floor contrasts greatly with the Teal we opted to paint the LR so we planned to use the colour wheel to transition from one room to the next with Maple Haze and Empire Jewel as transition hues.

First, however, we needed to move the sockets to their final locations. We have planned to build in some cabinetry on either side of the chimney breast so those needed to come up at least 75cm.

We’ve increased from three duplex outlets (six plugs) to five duplex, two triplex, and a bank of data connections so we now have 16 sockets, two CAT6 network ports, and two satellite feeds. There were also some lighting fixtures to cut out of the existing plaster (picture in this post).

All these cuts and the tops of the skirting board locations needed coarse plastering. This also served to spackle some holes.

The finishing plaster wasn’t even put down as a full skim coat. Instead, it was only skimmed very thinly into my ceiling trowel marks from the initial push to move in and the coarse plaster from which we excised all that old wallpaper from back then.

We finished cleaning up at 9:45 Sunday. This gives 5 full days for the mud to cure (it is humid in there, right now) before we settle in to the mist coat and probably three coats of the teal.