Painting and Decorating

The back bedroom has been a bit of an untidy mess since I moved in five years ago. It's got a bed and a few random shelves but mostly it's just boxes and piles of rubbish and things that could be given away/thrown out. It's been worse since K moved in as it now has two people's stuff. So we're re-doing it. New coat of paint followed by some big new shelves and a desk. At the same time we're going to try and sort through all the items and get rid of as much as possible.

Being something of a hoarder, this is a little painful. But do I really need to keep all those all VHS videos? I don't even have a VHS player any more. Ok, I do but it's in a cupboard. So the videos are all going to charity. Assuming they'll take them, I'm not sure whether there's even a second hand market for them in these days of Blu-Ray.

And once the videos are gone... I can get rid of the VHS player! No point in having one if I don't have any videos to play on it.

And so it goes.

Also on the way out will be old books, CD singles, some (but not all of my) cassette tapes. And I've already binned a tonne (literally) of magazines. Boy, do those things build up and take up space.

But it is a bit painful - a lot of these things have been with me for so long that they're part of me. Albeit a crap part, like an appendix.

The sorting and tidying is underway but we've had to move most of the bits into other rooms to make room for us to paint. This gives an incentive to finish the job as quickly as possible as I used to quite like it when I could walk through the living room in a straight line.

Yesterday we did some (four) testers on the wall. Today we chose the best... and both agreed! Which makes life much easier. Willow Green it's going to be. And so today we went to B&Q to buy the actual paint (and brushes, rollers etc). But before the main job, there's the prep - sanding, cleaning and all that boring jazz. And also the ceiling needed painting.

In fact, most of the ceiling didn't need painting but the edges did a bit. I hadn't been particularly careful when I painted it years ago and so there were several messy blue splodges on the ceiling where I'd missed the wall a little.

Division of labour - I did the ceiling as I'm much taller. K sanded and cleaned the door frame and skirting boards. I was happy with that as I can never be arsed to sand things off properly.

The paint was a bit odd. It was pure white but the actual paint is pink when wet. It dries to white but the pink is supposed to help you see where you've already painted - potentially useful when you're painting white onto a white surface. I'm not sure it actually works that well in practice - it dries pretty quickly and so it's still hard to see where you've been or if you missed a bit earlier. I expect I have missed several bits but it looks fine so I'm not going to look too closely.

Didn't actually take too long, I'd say we were working for no more than a couple of hours. But tomorrow will be harder work.

Oh well.