A Hallway Whodunnit

Sanding finally done, it's time for the first coats of paint! Hoooray! The living room is pretty easy, I'm starting with three coats of black, and then doing one or two with the anti-skid grit in it.

 

 

I would be lying if I said that instead of stenciling I wasn't thinking about making a tv-mystery-style chalk outline of a body on the floor here. It's so tempting. "Welcome to my living room, hardly anyone has died here!" I could spend my time imagining who it was and how they died and accessorize with 'police line - do not cross tape', lead pipes, candlesticks... the possibilities are endless. But really its just the upcoming hours of painstaking stenciling that are making me decoratively homicidal.

 

The Hallway is a bit more complicated. I'm not entirely sure what I want to do here. I went and dug out the paint for the kitchen, and it turns out it has three colours of blue (from left to right on the bottom half):  Riviera Paradise, Bliss Blue, and Azurean. The Bliss Blue and Azurean have faded over the last seven or so years, so that they're effectively the same colour on the walls. Most of my appliances and whatnot are red, white, or black, and the cabinets are two tones of grey. In other words, there are a lot of colours going on in the kitchen. I'm torn here. I know people like light, bright, airy kitchens, but I'm more a fan of something that looks like it could be used to brew up potions and bake children into pies. So I tested out a few different things on my practice board. Originally I wanted to make the kitchen a candyland path, but my artistic skills aren't up to recreating Queen Frostine. I have a stencil that I bought for the clown room and didn't wind up using, and I think I'm going to wind up using it here. It's not ideal, and it's not really what I want, but its cheaper than getting a new one, and this area is likely going to be tiled over at some point, or I'll do the whole kitchen floor, which will be an opportunity to change it if I hate it.

Next I had to figure out the borders. Since the areas connected to this hallway are painted black, I wanted to be able to carry black through this design too. I did some sketching with the level and got a rough area laid out, then taped it off.  I'm a bit worried its going to make the hallway look more narrow than it actually is, but again I consider hating it a low risk at this point since it may be covered in the next year or two.



I filled in the area with black. Eventually I'll put a stripe into this, so it won't be a solid black border, this is just the base coat. Once it has tried for three days, I'll take off the tape and put tape over this so that I can put down the base color and stripe. I'm not sure exactly how well this will work, if the lines are going to stay as sharp as the other areas, but I'm willing to try.

I finished painting the first gritty-coat tonight and went to rinse out my brush. When I came back, I found some suspicious black spots... Normally I would blame the Supervisor, but he's currently on a forced vacation downstairs waiting for the painting to end.

I finished painting the first gritty-coat tonight and went to rinse out my brush. When I came back, I found some suspicious black spots... Normally I would blame the Supervisor, but he's currently on a forced vacation downstairs to prevent this sort of mishap.

It appears that the good cat, the Nice cat, the cat who never-ever leaves my bedroom couldn't wait to leave his mark on the project. I'm ok with this, because I think that it looks like the cover of a mystery novel. About a cat who is falsely arrested for killing his roommate [in the living room, with the candlestick] and escapes from prison just after being paw-printed, only to return to the scene of the crime and seek revenge on the supervisor that framed him. I'd leave it if it the base coat was already down. Maybe I'll skip the stencil here and just let the cats run wild through the paint for a few days to match the chalk outline in the living room...