FAUX FINISH FAIL

I recently had this great idea that I would complete a faux-finish painting project in the main bathroom of our house. When I was in Elk City in October, the physician's office was painted beautifully using this technique, and I was inspired to incorporate this warm and inviting style into my home.

Ha.

For those of you who may not be aware of the technique, you take a dark paint color, mix in a considerable amount of glaze, and paint a small surface area of the wall. You then manipulate the paint to give a characteristic three-dimensional look using either a paintbrush or dry rag.

While this sounds wonderful, warm and fuzzy, and totally doable, I would just like to say that I do not recommend this project unless you have a considerable amount of upper body strength, an exorbitant amount of time and patience, and a sense of humor accompanied with a back-up plan.



The project started out strong (top left side of the wall), but a break was in order after three hours. The problems started when I resumed the next day and had to mix more paint/glaze -- as you can tell on the top and bottom right sides of the wall. Before I knew it, I had more paint in one area than another, and I was stepping out of the bathroom every time I applied paint to try to achieve evenness in terms of dimension. It was a disaster!

Looking at the picture now, I have to admit that it doesn't look as bad as I felt that it did at the time, but this project was consuming way more energy and time than I wanted to give. It took me two days to get this small area painted!

I decided that I would instead paint the bathroom a solid color. The paint that I had purchased for the faux project was way too dark for my preference, so I purchased a lighter color paint. However, when I got home and tried it out it was hideous!

So I mixed the darker paint with the lighter paint to come up with the perfect color, and voila!


The color that I am speaking of is the primary color in this picture above. If you look closely, however, you'll notice that the walls kind-of have a darker border around them. (Look, look at the borders everyone!)

The bathroom currently has this darker chocolate/purple border because of a slight miscommunication. You see, Jerm thought he would help out by painting the trim and edges one day while I was at work.

You know, as a surprise.

And so he painted continuously along the edges of the ceiling and baseboards, making great progress, not even taking time to stop and admire his fine work. At one point, he did have the thought that the paint was taking a rather long time to dry, but quickly dismissed the suspicion secondary to his goal of completion...



...until he got to the very end of his painting efforts and noticed that something was amiss.



I received this text: "Is the paint in this plastic bucket the old paint we're no longer using? That's what I was using and starting to realize it's drying darker...or just taking forever to dry."

As it turns out, his efforts turned out to be a much bigger surprise than even he anticipated.