Making a House a Home - Making a Mark

We've been in our new home now for over two months - it is amazing how the time has flown!

The first couple of weekends were spent making a big push to unpack and set things up to make the place liveable and then the tiredness of months spent viewing houses, packing boxes and moving home hit and we have allowed ourselves a few weekends of lethargy.

But we have been aching to start to make our mark on the new place, and we started by painting one of the spare rooms. We'd wanted to start with the master bedroom, but neither of us having painted a room in many years we thought that we would "practice" on a smaller room first.

Frances had found us a colour at the first search - Laura Ashley - Duck Egg Blue.

Testing out our choice

It was a two coat paint. The first coat didn't really seem to stick too thickly. We weren't sure if that was intentional or not.

The first coat

We'd bought some masking tape to put around the borders to keep them clean while rolling paint on. What we didn't bank on was the entire roll being used up before even finishing the first coat! It seemed to be faster to continue without it and use a kitchen towel to mop up any slips anyway.

Finished? Not quite.

The second coat made an immediate difference, going on smoothly and covering the original streaks. It dried nicely, but it was still patchy in places.

We're not entirely sure why this happened. Perhaps we were a bit cautious with the thickness of paint going on the walls, or perhaps the texture we were painting on was too shiny to hold the amount needed. Either way, we're glad we decided to practice in this smaller room first.

A couple of weekends later we put on a third coat. Slightly worried that it would dry differently to the original coats, but we needn't have been concerned. It all blended in smoothly and the finish is now perfect.

It feels good to have given part of the house a burst of colour to make it our own!