Eclipsing

Did you see the Eclipse last night?  My brother called me about 8:30 to remind me to go outside and catch a glimpse of it, but since I had neither proper viewing glasses or a welding helmet, I decided not to risk damaging my retinas and stay indoors to continue working on the painting project my wife and I were already engaged in when he called.  It sure would have been cool to go watch though, and hopefully we can get some solar viewing in during the Transit of Venus in a couple weeks. But even though we missed the eclipse, we did manage to eclipse a layer of primer with paint...so perhaps that counts for something.

We are almost done painting our dining room, and so far it looks fantastic.  Using spackle to fill in some nail holes in the wall worked very well, but for the little nicks and dings I mentioned before we just painted right over them.  They were too shallow for spackle, and with the new coat of paint they are barely noticeable even if you know where to look for them.  After that we applied an entire coat of primer, though I'm not exactly sure why.  The clerk at Lowe's kind of talked us into using primer, even though we have painted before without it.  I think it works best if you are painting a wall with no previous paint, like new wood or drywall, because the purpose of primer is to give the actual paint a good surface to which it can adhere.  After we had primed the wall we both agreed that it probably wasn't necessary, but I guess we can rest easy knowing we went the extra mile anyway even if it didn't actually help us out that much. It certainly didn't hurt things, so we've got that going for us :)

After the primer dried on we went over the whole thing with two coats of Olympic Premium One, because on textured walls like ours it's almost impossible to get everything covered in one coat (and yes we have tried, many times).  The trick with this room, as our friend Sarah explained, was getting a color that looked good but could also hold its own next to the very deep red of the living room walls.  And after looking at the results last night and this morning...so far so good.  The next step is to paint the trim above, which we started last night and hope to finish tonight.  After that we need to decide if we want to go ahead and do the bottom portion of the walls, since the white paint is somewhat faded and we already have the room prepared for painting anyway.  We'll see what happens on that front though, but in the meantime it's nice to at least have the major portion completed.  I'll see if I can post some photos in the next few days to show the before-and-after comparison.