Hey friends,

🎨 Painting

There are some lovely wallpapers out there for nurseries and children's rooms...or adult rooms for that matter but having taken so much of the it down, I'm not keen on putting more up. Abi, who's quite artsy, considered painting a mural but I had another lazier easier idea which I'll show you soon. In the meantime, all walls to be painted the same colour.

Before that, I need to cover up the plaster. In the past I've used a mist coat: diluted white paint. The point of it is that the now dry plaster will suck up a lot of water so if you were to go straight on with your finish paint you might get flaking. The other reason is to save on paint costs - there's no point using your good finishing paint just covering up the the colour of plaster.

This time I thought I'd try purpose-made bare plaster paint as the undercoat. It's maybe a tad more expensive but look at this coverage from just one coat:

Love it. It's also pretty viscous so you don't get the splatter that comes with a mist coat. I'm not sure how it works exactly but there's been no flaking. I won't be going back to mist coats.

You'll know by now that painting isn't my favourite task but I've picked up a few techniques over the years. Here are a couple:

• You'll inevitably get more paint on some parts of the roller than others so rather than keep rolling up and down where the same part of the roller hits the same spot of the wall, I will roll up, pull the roller away from the wall briefly so it spins in the air then make contact again and roll down. That way you get a good spread of paint.
• When painting an external corner, I roll towards the edge only. If you pull the roller back the corner tends to accumulate excess paint on the side.

I'm going with white for the ceiling and could easily have just done a second coat of the bare plaster paint and left it at that. However I only had enough in the tub to do all the surfaces once so I painted the second coat with standard white emulsion.

You'll know by now I don't pick colours. That's Abi's job. She picked French Grey by Farrow & Ball which is actually an earthy green 🤷‍♂️. For 5 litres of F&B's easy to clean 'Modern Emulsion': £100. Or I can colour match.

I received a comment on a YT vid once that accused me of boasting about stealing F&B's colours (I tend to remember the mean ones 😔). To be diplomatic I take the point that F&B put in the R&D but it would be a terrible world if a company could own a part of the visible light spectrum.

If F&B want me to buy their paint, it has to stand out as being the better paint. I've not used it so I can't say and I've read varying accounts.

I went with Johnstone's Cleanable Matt which is more expensive than their standard but I thought it would be worth it in the boy's bedroom (grubby fingers and whatnot). £86 for 5l, so not much cheaper, but you do get coverage of 15m2/l compared with F&B's 12m2/l. Or so they state. That would put it at £69 for the same coverage as F&B.

It's worth noting the colour match is unlikely to be 100% and will look different because the paints are different (different sheens for example) but it's pretty close. Would you even be able tell the difference though? Here's a colour perception test. See if you can beat my 9 out of 10.

I'm open to paint suggestions! I've read Dulux Trade Diamond Matt is highly durable and Screwfix have recently launched a range called LickPro - no colour match options though. What do you use?

Where the walls meet the ceiling I used painters tape to get a clean line rather than cutting in. It's quicker for my skill level.

I guess it's not too bad a job. I threw on some tunes from my parent's generation (Dire Straights, Bee Gees etc), sang along and got the job done. For all the plastering troubles, it turned out pretty well. Very smooth.

Back to the colour - it creates a fun forest-y vibe but it's also quite grown up so along with its hard wearing qualities my hope is that I won't have to repaint it anytime soon🤞. I've enough left over for touchups and for when the window gets replaced.

🪚 Skirting

If you're having any kind of hard flooring, you'll want to do that before skirting and architrave. But carpet goes after.

Then, as skirting butts up to the door architrave, architrave before skirting. I'd usually cut these on my mitre saw but it was chilly outside and nor did I want to do in situ and get sawdust on the newly painted walls. Instead I fetched my grandfather's mitre-box and did this all by hand.

Because I framed the doorway and the door lining I knew 45 degree mitres would be fine. See pic below.

1. Leave a gap after the edge of the door lining to allow for the door hinges.
2. I personally like to fill any gaps at the mitre join with wood filler. That way I can sand it to my liking.
3. However any gaps between the architrave and door lining/wall I like to caulk. I think this caulk is worth paying a bit extra for how easy it is to smooth out.

Moving onto the skirting, the first thing is to ensure your floor is flat, ideally using a laser level. If it's not and it will be obvious that the skirting isn't level, find the high spot and start your skirting from there, keeping it level and raising it up everywhere else with packers. The carpet will hide the gap at the bottom. If the gap is too large, well, I'd probably go back a few steps and level the joists. The other options are starting at the lowest point and cutting the bottoms of the skirting so the top stays level or if you're happy mechanically fixing you could bend the skirting to the floor shape if you're not fussed about the top being completely level.

Generally speaking, you should mitre external corners and scribe internals. With painted MDF which is more dimensionally stable than real wood it's not so important so you can mitre internal corners. I've done it and it turns out fine but while it's quicker to cut it's harder to get a tight fit.

So I'm scribing. First, cut a 45 degree like so:

Next, using a coping saw, cut along the edge where the white meets the MDF. If you're using wood you can highlight this line with a pencil.

Cutting straight down through the skirting is fine for perfect 90 degree corners or if the corner is a little acute. If the corner is obtuse then cut in at an angle behind the white (if that makes sense). That way you can get the skirting together tightly.

The beauty of this method is you can then cut the other end of the skirting in a perfect straight cut (a butt end) which is easy to measure. The next piece of skirting will then be scribed to it.

As with the architrave I like to use wood filler at the corners and then sand it to a perfect 90. If you get a hairline crack after that, use a smidge of caulk.

This one was a bit tricky to cut but came out well:

To get the skirting to stick to the walls, I used grab adhesive and put heavy objects in front while it dried. I'm not sure what the consistency of grab adhesive is these days because I just finished using up my box of Gripfill that I had left over from the garden room but it was very thick which made it difficult to get tight with the wall. So I switched over to the Marmox adhesive I used in the bathroom. I've worked out what it is now - Screwfix call them Hybrid Sealants & Adhesives so I may buy them in future rather than grab adhesive as it's much more spreadable.

I then filled the gap between skirting and wall with caulk and shaped it with a profiler. I use this one; it's good but it's the second I've purchased because the silicone heads disintegrate quickly so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.

You get a really clean white line but unfortunately even when dry it attracts dust like crazy and you can't vacuum it up:

So you have to go around gingerly painting it all and trying not to get white on the walls. The paint I'm using for all the woodwork/MDF is my trusty Johnstone's Aqua Guard Brilliant White. And it is brilliant - water based so cleans off brushes as easily as wall paint. No more oil based wood and metal paint getting on my hands.

Looking crisp! As one of your pointed out to me, another advantage of dot and dabbing plasterboard is you get a flatter wall after plastering. You can see the slight wave where skirting meets wall on the right chimney wall. I'm becoming more keen on the idea.

The skirting is 95mm high. It's the same as in the first bedroom I completed which I matched to the rest of the house. However I'll probably take all the old skirting out over time so perhaps I should have gone for something different and possibly taller.

The rule of thumbs for choosing size of skirting are:

1. 1/8th the height of your room. At 2.52m that would mean 315mm high skirting. Sounds imposing, and pricey.
2. Double the width of your architraves. Because all our doors are in the corners of rooms there's not room for wide architraves (45-50mm) so I went with this rule. I actually can't follow rule 1 because my sockets aren't very high and can't easily be moved up far.

Or I could have gone with something in-between. Standard sized skirting is 145mm for example. Maybe that would have been sensible. Ah well. At least the chamfer style is easy to vacuum.

👋

That was a lot longer than I expected. I've completed the carpet write-up but will save it for another day.

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