Finishing straight (part 1)

With a title like that you're expecting photo after photo of beautiful, ready rooms. Actually no. Not yet. While we're on to some finishing tasks for the first two floors, there is a long way to go still.

What we can tell you from our progress so far is a lot of care is needed during finishing  - hence the title of this post. Let's take painting - something we've spent the last couple of weeks doing. It is one of those jobs that sounds quick and easy, but in reality it's deceptively tough. With new plaster walls and ceilings, three coats are generally needed. What's more the devils in the detail. Sure you can do three coats on a ceiling in a couple of hours. But in rushing it like that there's the risk of having to do a fourth, fifth, sixth coat.

Let's look at our first floor restored ceiling for a minute and how it evolved across the coats. Here is how it started out after our undertaker restored the plaster work.

Got potential but a bit of work needed (ahem).

And our moulure has definintely seen better days.

Seven hours later (yes, you read that right) we have applied a first coat of watered down paint to the new plaster, and it looks like this.

Getting better, but plenty of imperfections still visible.

Moulures too.

"Seven hours?!" I hear you say? The problem is not the ceiling per se, but rather the moulures (mouldings and covings) around the side and in the centre. It takes an age to go round them with a paintbrush; and they generally needed sanding first to remove imperfections such as little bits of excess plaster. We then spent another hour touching stained bits of them up with a stain proof primer before the second coat.


Then we come to the second coat. Same thing. Except this time we used a one-coat paint. Our experience of this stuff so far is mixed. It has proven to be great for the moulures which we go over carefully back and forth with a paintbrush, so it thick texture gets forced into every little hole - and one coat is enough. However, it seems to be less effective with flat walls and ceilings - it's so thick that it leaves a patchy result however many times you go over it with a roller. It seems to need watering down for that.

So another five hours or so on the second coat. 13 hours in total and here's our ceiling. We're praying it looks good enough to avoid another coat which would probably require another half a day.

Is this good enough now? What do you reckon?

Moulures looking  as originally intended!

With the ceilings of eight rooms to do on the first two floors the time quickly stacks up.

Then we come to the walls. We've been masking up the white ceilings with tape to ensure straight lines where they meet the coloured walls-to-be. A corner which we could cut - but again best not to in order to finish straight. It also turns out not all masking tapes are created equal. Some fall off everything, some stick so hard they rip the paint off if you leave them on too long. For now we've settled on a brand call Tesa which seems to have the correct balance of the two after experience the two extremes above.

Tape, tape everywhere.

So there goes another hour in doing that before painting the walls.

But the results are worth it!

At the end it looks like this. We forgot to take the masking tape off before taking the photo (!) but the lines are straight and no paint on the tile edges. Really.