The painting process-library.

When you enter our home, the first thing you see is the 'library' (it has all our books in it but really is just an room with a few books in) and I was pretty over staring at some pink walls so finally we got round to painting them and sparkling up the room. This room is a great size and needed some wall love to showcase it's potential. Warning...this post is fairly photo heavy as I wanted to make sure I was documenting each of the steps.

before

It was pretty easy decision to use Dulux 'Antique White' as it's my favourite shade of white and I just knew white was going to brighten up the space. This room is quite huge so white was going to make it feel even bigger and grander.

ah, a lovely white wall!

The first wall was painted white about a month ago (we were feeling inspired one day) but the rest of the room cried out for a paint job. Since we have been painting so many rooms lately, I thought I'd share a bit about the painting process for any people out there who haven't done a lot of painting before.

Step 1: prep
As you can see in the before photo, we had already started the prep which means filling in the holes and removing unwanted hooks etc. Some holes may need to be filled, sanded back and refilled again before they are great. I am not an expert at prep but I feel confident enough filling most holes and cracks (though bigger ones would call for an expert). If you have a new house though (or one with walls in better condition than ours) you may be able to skip the prep step and go straight to the primer coat. The photo shows quite a big crack that needed filling.

Step 2: Undercoat and paint the ceiling

We always paint the ceiling first and have used Dulux 'pure white'  for all the ceilings in our house. It is truly amazing how much better the room feels just with a freshly painted ceiling. We do the edges first with a brush (this requires some patience) before rolling the middle section. We usually do an undercoat followed by 2 top coats. However because the roof was so dark we needed to do 3 top coats but this is not the norm.The library has crown molding with a marbled edging. I'm not the biggest fan of the marbled edging but my parents have convinced us to live with it for a while as apparently marbled painted is expensive and fancy and they think I might regret painting over it. I'm really not sure. Because of the marbling we decided to use some dulux 'silver dollar' paint around the edges so the difference between the marble and the white wouldn't be so starch. This took a bit of extra time and patience but I think it is more successful that just white and marbled. Silver dollar was the colour we also used in our front entrance way and hallway beside the kitchen so it's a colour that has been repeated through the house.

 Painting the corners of the roof and cutting around the light and air conditioning vent.

 After the ceiling had been rolled

 

Painting the 'silver dollar' trim ( you can see the big difference between the grey and original pink trim)

Step 3: undercoat and paint the walls.

The walls require the same process as above; do the corners and edges first and then roll in between.

Step 4: let the fun begin- styling!

*disclaimer- I have not finished styling this room at all, lots of the furniture in it is from the guest room (the room that we are currently painting.
The library is a big room oozing with potential but we're not able to buy any new furniture at the moment and have more important things to spend money on in the immediate future. However we could still use a whole bunch of previous DIY projects in the room. The library is home to our upholstered window seat, painted bookshelf and reupholstered baroque style chair. This room is the only room in the house to have gotten new wooden flooring- every other room is still embracing the green carpet of the previous owners. Having a new floor really makes this room feel even more finished from the start.

The lighting in the room is quite tricky to work with so while the before and after looks relatively similar (in terms of paint colour) the wall was originally much darker (like the photos taken while painting). This room is expansive and fairly empty and I believe the styling will evolve as we collect more treasures and work out the exact purpose of this room and the mirror currently sitting on the window seat will find a new home shortly in the guest room.

For the future I'd love to:
-find an amazing comfortable vintage couch for the room
-create built in bookshelves around the window and more storage
- change the lighting
- find some more artwork

Hopefully anyone who comes across this might find this guide to the painting process useful. With this room painted now, we only have two more rooms to paint (craft room and guest room) and some outside painting. I'm not sure it'll all get finished before the baby comes but we've made a pretty good effort!

Lisa x