Weekend Review (aka "The Curse of the Enamel Paint")

Apparently I'm not one to learn from past mistakes. While I build up to that part of the story of our weekend, let me go over some other things first. We have been super busy this past week with the cabinets arriving and trying to finish up other things too. This weekend we decided not to touch the cabinets and, instead, we'd just tie up the loose ends with the yard and painting. I've been meaning to paint the bathroom white and this weekend I really wanted to get that done and over with. It had a rose/mauve color with green tile and brown/neutral floor. Just too much going on. I had all my painting and priming stuff out for the bathroom when we decided to paint a bedroom that we hadn't planned on painting. In fact, we had probably been in that room a combined total of 5 times prior to this weekend. It was just kind of a no man's land. It is the bedroom that we intend to convert to the master bathroom and had no plan for it in the meantime. The bedroom was a bright yellow and had some yucky carpet in it. Rob got all the carpet, pads and tack strips up and it was looking so good that we decided to use some of that primer I had out and some of our extra "Churchill Hotel Vanilla" paint and just get the room looking good.

Before:


After:


You may also notice the furniture in the room now- we picked that up at a yard sale on Saturday and the room is ready to go now. Well, I suppose we still need a box spring and mattress to go with the bedroom set before we have anyone stay over...

I think I'm ready to finally talk about how I sometimes don't learn from my past mistakes. I had a little, okay HUGE, problem when I painted the kitchen in my old house. I didn't know the difference between enamel and latex paint or that it mattered if you painted one over the other. After I painted bright red latex paint over the existing enamel paint and it started peeling off like a sunburn, I learned the difference really fast. When we were getting ready to paint the bathroom in this house, I was pretty sure the paint in there was enamel so I asked two different people, on two different trips to Lowes, what to do to ensure I didn't have the same problem again. Both people told me to sand the paint to get the shine off, paint a coat of the Valspar High Hiding primer and then paint the latex white paint on. After three coats of paint (1 primer and 2 paint), we peeled off the tape and the same thing happened! We scored the paint too before we peeled the tape off so that was not the problem. It turned out to be not nearly as bad as the kitchen incident and I think we were able to save it. However, as soon as we peeled that tape off, I remembered what to do to prevent this from happening- something I had learned from a professional painter after the first disaster. So for anyone out there needing to know what to do to paint latex over enamel, you use BIN. I did that in the kitchen to fix my mistake and it worked great. Anyhow, here are some photos of the bathroom:

Before:


After:




We got a new shower curtain that has a bamboo print and also bought a little bamboo plant for the bathroom and that really brings the green and brown together. Now it actually seems calming and peaceful instead of wild, mismatched craziness!