The room that wouldn't paint

(Is it gauche to draw attention my high quality Saskatchewan-literary-figure Farley Mowat reference in the title?  Gauche or not, it's too late because in being all meta about things I have already pointed it out.)

 

As I believe I mentioned a few weeks ago, Jeannette I were in the market for a house in Regina.  Fortunately, after a not overly-long search we found one which we were able to take possession of at the end of February.

 

While we were generally pleased with the condition of the house and the decorating choices made by the previous owner, we were a little baffled by the paint choices in the bedrooms.  For some reason all three bedrooms (including trim, closets, and ceilings) were painted the same mustardy yellow.  And while we thought this questionable decorating choice might have been a holdover from the seventies (the previous owners had owned the house since the 1960s), we eventually learned that the paint had actually just been applied about five years ago, or well into the first decade of the 21st century?  What was up with that?

 

So, not surprisingly, one our first projects upon taking possession of the house has been to engage in re-painting the three bedrooms.  Not surprisingly we started with the master bedroom (which we've painted grey - though it looks blue because of the way the room is lit).  We then moved on to the smallest of the three bedrooms and the room that Jeannette is using as an office.  Though this room is now officially 'sage green,' when I'm feeling like getting dirty looks and snorts targeted at me I refer to the room as being painted 'something approximating mold green.'

 

A few days after we completed these first two painting projects, both of which moved quite quickly, we decided to tackle the third room: my office/the guest bedroom.

 

Because of my indecisiveness, Jeannette's unwillingness to let me paint all of the walls and ceiling different, not-white colours, and an incredible desire not to spend any more time in the paint store we have decided to paint the room a very light orange (almost a peach) colour.

 

At first things seemed to be going well - you know, it looked as though paint was being applied to the walls by our rollers and brushes.  Of course, it didn't take long to realize that our original impressions were mistaken. 

 

It soon became clear that this orange paint just wasn't covering the original mustardy yellow paint.  And this despite the fact that we're using exactly the same kind of paint that we used in the other three rooms that covered the yellow perfectly in two coats.

 

And to make matters worse, instead of getting two full coats from the gallon we purchased - as we did in the comparably sized grey room - we managed to only eke out about 1.6 coats. 

 

Now that we've managed to get our hands on a second gallon of paint and applied another 1.5-2.0 coats we're still only 'getting close to being done.'

 

How is this possible?  How is it that this orange stuff is doing so much worse a job of covering the existing paint than either the green or grey paint did?

 

Anyway, despite the fact that we're still not done - I can at least take some comfort in the fact that most of the original paint has more or less been covered and the end is, hopefully, in sight.

 

Of course, the bummer is that because of all of the new paint the room will be about a .5 cm smaller at the end of this process than it was at the beginning.