RANCH REMODEL

We’ve started in the master bedroom and things are going along nicely. After the demolition (again, skipping the boring stuff), the first thing was to paint the walls and ceiling.

First, we had to prep the walls. When you have almost 50 years of smoke, dents, and cracks, it takes a little patience to clean and prepare everything for primer and paint. It’s tedious and annoying, but it pays off. When painting, I highly recommend doing all you can to prep the surfaces you’re going to paint. We used a 1:1 solution of Tide (without bleach) and warm water to clean the walls. For one, this cleans off the dust and cobwebs, but it also clears the residue left by cigarette smoke. If anything, it helped cut the smell down. After patching many cracks and holes (I won’t get into details on this, there’s plenty of sites that give you tutorials), we sprayed one coat of Kilz 2 latex primer. The sprayer we use, the Titan XT250, sprays a fairly thick coat so only one pass was necessary.

Master bedroom with walls and ceiling primed

Next step was paint. We decided to go with a newer paint at Home Depot called Fresh Aire. It’s an eco-friendly paint that has no VOCs in the paint base or colorants, which means a better air-quality in your home. Yes, it’s a little more expensive than standard paint, but it’s a small price to pay for a healthier atmosphere in the home. Overall, we are very satisfied with the paint. It went on very smooth and didn’t leave an annoying smell in the room for days afterwards. My only complaint about the paint is that you can only buy single gallons. There’s no option of a 2 or 5 gallon bucket.

When purchasing Fresh Aire, there are a few things to know before getting the paint mixed. If you can, find someone that’s mixed the paint before. It’s a different system than all the other paints. The paint base comes in gallon buckets like normal. The colorant, however, comes in a silver packet. On the outside of the packet is a label that tells you the color name and also which base to mix it with (there are 2 types of base). The paint pro then has to open the silver packet to retrieve the colorant packet, which is not spelled out clearly on the outer packet. All you do is place the colorant packet in the paint base, seal the bucket, and mix it for 4 minutes. The colorant packet dissolves in the paint base and the colorant inside mixes perfectly with the base. It’s quite an interesting process, but can definitely go wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing. We learned the hard way, hopefully you won’t also.

Master bedroom with walls and ceiling painted

Colors used in master bedroom:

Walls – Nightfall
Ceiling – Still Moment

Things I learned from painting the master bedroom:

- Sprayers are great for priming a room
- Sprayers are only great for painting rooms larger than 250 square feet. It only takes about 10 minutes to spray the room, but 45 minutes to clean the rig. You can roll and brush a bedroom with 2 people just as fast, and less mess.
- I have a lot of respect for guys that can patch holes and cracks and blend it with the rest of the wall. It’s an art form, and they earn their money.
- Wear full body coveralls, goggles, and mask when spraying or else you end up with white nose hairs.

We’re very excited about how the room is turning out so far. Next up I’ll touch on the recessed lighting and audio, the part where the geek in me will begin to show.