Sunday 25 January 2009

The new living room

There is a room that I completely forgot about till now and that is the living room.

Right behind the kitchen, with just the low wall to divide it from my cooking battlefield, this room contains a good third of the focal points of my house, meaning the Nintendo Wii, the DVD player, my TV set and the Popcorn media player.




The Living room was yet in the same condition I found it.

Painted in a disgusting creamy tone and with a dirty-white (that made it look dirty even if you cleaned it) linoleum as flooring.



In fact cleaning it only made it shine making the black spots even more visible.

On top of that ( on top?) the plastic was cracked and in certain points you could see the underlying concrete.

Now, enough was enough and you understand that that room had to go.

Battleplan was divided in three phases:

- Wall painting

- Flooring

- Furnitures

Room is quiet large, about 323 squared feet so each of those three phases will need at least a couple of days to complete.

That considered, I realized that three week ends of the year are doomed, adding up more days to the count of the ones I already work in instead of resting myself ^_^''

The colors

Wall colors were clear to me from the first moment.

This room is the fuel chamber of the engine of the house ( the corridor) and almost all the light enters from here and arrives directly to the bedroom.

Dark and cold colors are thus unacceptable and I already planned to use red in my bed room later this year, thus yellow was the only option.

Naturally, if you have to do something, why not complicate it? So I decided for two different yellow, a darker glossy one that was painted on the walls till about 2 feet from the ceiling and a clearer mat one that was given on said ceiling and on the remaining unpainted portion of the walls.

To "melt" the two layers, so that they do not look so neatly cut, I did plan on mixing the two colors together going from dark to lighter tone and giving the color in multiple short overlapping layers.

Work needed 6 days to be completed.

Everyone will object that there are NOT such as week-ends of six days and I have to agree on that, thus I used up a week in which my work was scheduled in the afternoons and worked in the morning at the painting.

This gave my colleagues the one time opportunity to see me arrive to work with hair colored in different tones of yellow and painting in most unspeakable parts of my body.

Logistics

When the floor will be set I will have to move all the present furnitures out of the room ( that or pass "Telekinesis I" with Mrs Grey ) right now I can just mass them in the center of the room and cover them with a plastic sheet



Covering the floor itself proved useless.

First, the color is plastic and thus you can just wait that it dries and get the whole spot away from the floor.

Second, that linoleum had to be covered thus a couple of yellow spots makes no difference.

The instruments

Seen that I was alone and had a short time to work on it and, last but not least, I'm a geek I bought myself a little gadget.



This lovely instrument allows you to suck the paint inside the body as a syringe would, after that using the handle you push it out through the roll.



So till the piston is not at the end of it's course, you do not have to go for more paint.



This and the fact I had not to dab it bought me a lot of time :)


To fade the colors I resorted to an old tecnique of mine when I was a miniature collector, brushings.

Thus I took a sponge and, after binding it with some tape and cutting it roughly I had a crude but effective brush.




To dab the eccess paint I rolled some kitchen paper around my arm.



Let's get started.

First part consisted in delimiting the "playing field with some tape.


Then paint the lower half.



Once dry ( technically I could do it after half an hour, God bless Acrylic vinilic paints) I took the tape off and inversed the border then I started painting the upper half and the ceiling.




I then removed the tape again ( Cursing and cussing as it ripped off some portions of the paint in the process) and did the highlights.



End of first part.

Here is the final result.

I can assure you that the faintest ray of sunlight that enters the room lights it up.



First part accomplished, now dearest linoleum, it is YOUR time!