I was curious to see how the taping would turn out. I had told Kay what my suspicions were (leaking and peeling paint off) but I lost the battle. He wanted it taped, so I was going to paint our lines over tape.

I mixed the water in the paint, stirred and then got busy for the next twelve hours on Sunday.

Kay wanted me to cover EVERYTHING so we even had plastic covers drapping down over all the cabinets. I thought it was totally overkill because I never got a drop of paint on anything besides the tops of the cupboards and we couldn’t open the refrigerator the whole day.

Why did it take twelve hours to paint though? Well… the first part was a little slow because I had a lot of edges to do and it was up high. But really, it was the big wall that took forever.

See, the extending roller we bought sucked. Big time.

The roller itself wasn’t terribly long and the extension part broke pretty fast… so it would collapse on my hand and pinch my fingers all the time. I was stuck using it half-way up from then on, while watching my fingers for more pinching. I had to paint the whole 9’2″ ceiling in portions from the top with the ladder, the middle and then the bottom instead of having a nice long roller to do it ALL in one go. I was so pissed we didn’t buy a nice long normal roller.

Our edging brush was as terrible as I thought it would be. It was just big and so imprecise, it made me feel like a two year old painting when I used it. Our saving grace was the small roller I bought at the last minute (at Kay’s request) because it was the only decent roller I had… I painted the entire ceiling line using a very small angled art brush I had laying around and using the roller to do most of the top half of the wall and the bottom half of the wall.

Using a 4″ wide small roller to paint most of your huge wall is kind of sad and pathetic, but I had to make things work.

I also had tons of issues with paint dispersion. The problem with the buckets was that I could not roll paint off with the plastic sieve on the side. The fluffy rollers picked up SO much paint and if I dunked the whole roller it was completely too much. If I only dunked half or so, I couldn’t evenly distribute it with the roller sieve, so I was either stuck trying to use an overly full brush on the wall (and risk having drops splatter back at me) or painting with a patchy, unevenly distributed roller.

All in all, painting with this awful equipment was a terrible, exhausting experience. By 8pm I was done with the first coat of the purple wall and 2 coats of the green wall, so we took the plastic wrap down in the kitchen and had dinner before I finished the purple wall painting, but that’s when we took off the first tape and saw the damage:

Everywhere I had taped in the kitchen had bled through, even on the corner up there. All came through the tape, JUST like I thought it would.

Since I had taped the kitchen ceiling with the pink tape before finding out it peeled off the ceiling paint, I also ripped off a lot of ceiling while I was carefully taking down the tape.

I was SO disappointed and pissed.

Kay was of course also upset that we took the ceiling off with the tape and that the edges turned out so badly.

Look how terrible it looks! It’s awful!

With this in mind, I finished painting the purple wall until midnight and then carefully took off the tape again to see the same wavy lines.

Ugh!! In retrospect, I should have argued that our textured walls made for a bad taping situation, but Kay was seriously so dead set on them.

In the end, our ONLY good line was the ceiling in the living room that I painted by hand with the art brush. It looked totally perfect compared to all the shitty taping lines.

Kay finally admitted that my freehand painting is excellent and that we probably shouldn’t have used tape. Or if we did, we should have painted white down first, but we didn’t have any white paint from our walls.

Despite the annoying flaws at the edges, I do really love the colors. And Kay is contacting our contractor to see if the painting guys can give us some of the white they used on their walls so that we (I) can fix the edges… everywhere. Baaaah.

Did you ever have a project that you knew would go wrong from the start?