Fun with painting

My parents are going to be visiting from Saturday through Tuesday, so I figured I'd paint the spare bedroom to give them a nice place to stay. Now, before I go into the painting scheme, let me explain this bedroom. When we bought the house, it was painted a bright neon blue with neon lime green trim, and it had Batman decals all over the walls, with a Batman border at the top of one wall, halfway pulled down, and not very well installed.

The border and stickers came off easily, but after two coats of primer, the neon paint still showed a bit. Here's a photo of the original paint job, with Ms. Charlotte, our fluffy foster feline:


Pretty awful, isn't it? What you can't see in the photo is that they stopped painting the walls approximately 2" from the ceiling, so there was a rough top border of white--they didn't even use tape, just stopped painting. Maybe the previous residents were exceptionally short? I don't know--I'm 5'1", and I could reach, so that is probably not the case. Also, in some places, they had tried painting black over the neon green border, but they did not prime or sand it, so it was just a nasty layer of black, streaky brushstrokes with that neon lime showing through quite glaringly.

Now, I'm not a very good painter. I will be absolutely honest about my skills; the pictures you are about to see are not wonderful work, and I haven't yet touched up or fixed any of the mistakes. Also, I managed to spill a crapton of green paint on the carpet; I got a lot of it out with the steam vac, but I need to get some acrylic paint remover next time I go to the home improvement store.

The first thing I did was layer faux Venetian plaster on two of the walls. I used the trowel method, which was really hard on my hands and wrists, but the results were worth it. Also, their "roller method" would be nearly impossible with the thickness of the paint. It's like creamy molasses. I had just enough for two walls, with a small amount saved for touch-ups. I then painted the trim on those walls wine-red, and painted the other two walls red:




The darker brown areas are just not yet dry. It's hard to see the texture in these photos, but it's a really neat effect. I think it was worth the effort.

Next, I did a horrifically sloppy job of painting the trim and accents green:




I have a LOT of touching up to do on it, and I might even paint over the green, but I do like the color scheme. I put up some red curtains, but they weren't really big enough, so they might either be added to or swapped out entirely.

Doing all of that took me three days, and it wiped out my physical resources. I am feeling quite exhausted, and I am only able to type this because I took extra pain medicine. My hands and wrists are very unhappy with all the troweling I did, and paint rollers are really, really hard on my whole body (it's too bad they were the only way to get the red on the way I wanted it).

Mom and dad will be arriving Saturday night or Sunday morning (they're driving to Schenectady, NY from Quincy, IL), so I'll probably be quiet on here during their stay.