There is a Reason We Aren't Painters

So I think I mentioned in one of the first posts that we were going to do what we could to help cut some of the costs of our remodel. One of our bright ideas was painting one of the back bedrooms of the house ourself...everyone paints themselves, right? No big deal.

The back story of this attempt is that a few years ago we decided to paint about half of the interior space in our old house. We spent one weekend moving furniture around and painting all day and all night, sleeping in paint fumes, and by the end hating every minute of it, vowing to never paint again.

We had some repairs made to the old house before we sold it which involved having one room painted...and after seeing how easy it was for the painters to paint that room I was even more convinced that painting would never occur again in my future. If you have never witnessed a realy painter paint a room (no tape, straight lines, no mistakes!) then don't, because you will never want to paint again.

So, back to the new house, somehow we forgot all of this and decided to try again. Clint actually began this experiment on his own one night but didn't get very far because the previous owners had left some shelves on the walls that had apparently been hung while the paint was still wet. So when Clint went to take them down, he took a good chunk of the wall down with them. So one night was spent patching those spots and letting them dry.

We went over to the house one evening thinking that we would get the room painted that night and move on to future tasks. Three hours later, this was our progress:

ONE WALL! I know it's hard to see since we are going from a really bright yellow to a more subtle yellow, but here is a little more proof to show we actually did something, although not much.

Apparently the paint that was on the wall before is a satin finish which doesn't really absorb paint very well, so we kept watching every stroke seem to disappear. We finally were so frustrated, thinking that we were going to end up painting the whole thing and then have to pay someone anyway to make it look decent because it looked so bad while we were painting, that after three hours we just gave up. Coming back the next day it looked tons better (maybe impatience is really our issue), but I haven't seen either one of us volunteer to pick up those paintbrushes and try again. And now with all of the holes in the walls we are going to have to pay a painter anyway to patch everything, right? And they are so fast and it's so easy for them, right? And really, in these tough economic times, don't we owe it to them to let them use their talents?! :)