The Super Treacherous Paint Job from Hell

So last week when I started prepping Ethan's room for painting, I made the super bummer discovery that the paint had really failed in there.

It just peeled off the wall -epecially in the areas that were mudded at the drywall joints.

Because I was going from dark blue to white, I knew this paint job was going to be tedious but this peeling paint issue was taking it to a different level altogether. 

After I scraped the paint that easily came off, I used spackle to smooth the transition from the remaining paint to the bare walls so that they weren't completely ridgy. I like the spackle that transitions from pink to white as it dries because it is helps to be able to see the patches while working. After it dried, I used a large plasterers sponge to sand.

This was beyond tedious. I did two walls and then made the executive decision to leave the other two alone and just paint over them. It's a bummer to be painting over paint that could/will fail but my only consolation is that if/when the paint dings, it will ding down to the mud and because the walls will be white now, the dings won't be nearly as visible as they were with the dark paint. The perfectionist in me cringes at how lame this is, but I was really losing it over this paint job and that's not good. I figure that some day when I sell my house I'll have to get it all professionally painted anyway so whoever can deal with this problem then.

The second part of this paint job that couldn't be ignored was repairing the window sills. This is a long and complicated saga, which is too boring to go into in great detail. Suffice to say that when we built the house, the edges of these sills where mudded incorrectly which caused them to chip at the corners almost immediately. When I asked to have them repaired, it was done in a super lame-ass way -they just added a corner bead on top of everything and added an additional layer of mud (over the unprimed paint), which of course also peeled off like an onion.

So these I scraped down entirely and redid correctly with the filler built up flush to (but not over) the substrate sill, which is made of melamine.

This was a perfect job for Bondo because it is far more durable than spackle or joint compound. Usually I use the stuff designated for auto body repair, but decided to try out this new product which is for home use. Honestly, it worked just like the auto body stuff -I couldn't tell the difference (smelled just as toxic but dried really quickly and was sandable in minutes). This product absolutely requires a ventilator when using.

I decided to go with this shellac based primer for the entire room. My greatest worry was getting proper adhesion on all of the different surfaces I now had -paint, spackle and raw mud. The best thing about this stuff is it dries very quickly and truly sticks to everything. The worst is that it is very liquidy so that even edge-lock painters tape failed with this shit.

 Grrrrr.

In the end the room came out pretty great. It's pure white -Benjamin Moore's OC-117 (just like the rest of my house). It took 2 coats of primer and 3 coats of Aura to get it covered. Ethan's room is now very sparse and lovely. It's a huge change from the old days (2011) and (2012).

He's still deciding on what to do with his windows. He absolutely must have curtains because he is a teenage vampire and needs to be able to sleep in on weekends.