ORC Week 3 Master Bedroom: Lessons Learned in Paint (and Issues in the Sitting Room)

Get Caught Up: 

| Week 1 | Week 2 | 

All about Paint

Picking The perfect Paint Color

You’d think choosing a paint would be a simple, but in fact, it is not. Especially not if you’re choosing from a shade of white, as we are in the One Room Challenge.

We do have a simple trick up our sleeve to help you pick the perfect color from several different shades, and not get mixed up:

• Label each sample can: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

• Paint and label your swatches in the exact same order on your wall

• Choose various locations around the house to paint swatches
• Live with in for a few days – see how each color looks in different light.

In our house, the trim color is nice white, but not stark white. We really did not want to have to paint all the door molding and base trim at the time, so I chose a wall color that best matched our existing trim with the naked eye. I was going for a white that didn’t have an undertone of blue, but did not appear too creamy either. After painting several swatches around the downstairs of our house and living with it for a few weeks, we finally decided.

Our Color Selection for the ORC Master Bedroom

(Fun fact: this is the exact color we chose for the Mid Mod Flip a few weeks prior to the ORC!)

Learn About Paint Sheen

Now let’s talk about paint finish or sheen. A paint’s sheen certainly effects the appearance of a room and there are several options for sheen. Going from shinniest to dullest:

• High Gloss
• Semi-Gloss
• Satin
• Eggshell
• Flat

… and more recently a Matte!

Personally, I love how flat paint diminishes imperfections and doesn’t distract your eyes with reflective light. We use this finish for all interior walls at our flips. The problem is functionality. I was overjoyed to hear that there is now a wipeable matte paint! The look of flat but with the functional of eggshell! 

After researching monochromatic walls for our bedroom design, I learned that you can add a good bit of dimension to your walls by painting the wall and trim in slightly different finisihes of the same color. 

So, that is exactly what we are going to do for the Master Bedroom:

• Wall color in matte
• Wall trim, doors, and casing in eggshell

Top 3 Painting Tips

We’ve had our fair share of painting projects thus far and Uriah happens to be quite particular about optimal painting techiques. He has 3 major painting tips to share with you in this video:

• Proper Painting Prep
• Application by Brush
• Application by Roller

A friend of mine, Lindsey, from Building Bluebird, made a video sharing 5 easy steps for painting a carpeted room! It’s really good.

How We Almost Painted The Wrong Color for the One Room Challenge

No matter how much experience one has, there’s always room for lessons learned. Now, I have a story to tell you about, what could have been, a major paint fail with the One Room Challenge of our Master Bedroom:

I felt confident of my color selection and finally painting day arrived! Walls were sanded, base molding was taped, tarps laid out and a nice coat of primer on the walls. The most amazing thing? I had childcare; everything was prepped.

I started to cut in around a light switch, but immediately noticed something was not right. The paint was slightly more off-white than my sample color – hardly noticeable, but not what I chose. I knew the wrong shade should would change the feel of the entire room. After allowing the area to dry and testing out a few other ares of the house against my original sample, it was clear. The color was definitely off.

We had already bought 10 gallons of paint!!!! That’s $300 worth of paint, in case you are wondering.

Here’s what happpened. I purchased sample paints at our local Benjamin Moore carrier. However, when the time came to actually buy the paint, we purchased through another home improvement vendor because we get a better discount with our commercial account. Then, we color matched to the Benjamin Moore paint. This is something we do all the time for our flips and have never had a problem, so I didn’t realize the issues that could arise. It turns out, they had color matched it to the Behr brand Vanilla Milkshake rather than Benjamin Moore Vanilla Milkshake and the base colors are different.

*Lesson learned: play it safe and always get your sample color from the same store you’d be buying from, even if you are color matching to another brand’s colors. 

All was made right in the end. The vendor ended up allowed us to return the $300 worth of paint. We bought our paint direct from Benjamin Moore.

Paint selections aren’t all that easy, but landing the right color makes all the difference. We are grateful that we stopped and swapped out the color because we couldn’t be happier with how the room turned out.

ORC Update: Issues in the Sitting Room

Our master bedroom makeover is well underway now – the biggest update: We painted!! Can’t express enough how happy we are to say goodbye to that tanish-beige! Step one in this room is finally complete and it feels so good. Now we have a nice pallet to work with. 

If you followed along on Instagram this week, you saw that I purged my closet, did a little re-organization and moved the small dresser in there. All this to make room for new side tables! Oh my goodness, having the hardest time with those!

We also had a few issues come up with our sitting room design.

Apparently, a communication error left one of us a bit confused about final location of the electrical components behind the wall. My original design plan called for the sconce light box to move down and to the left so we would have a fixture above the floating “desk” shelf. Then the outlet for the TV would also move down and to the right. Neither of us thought about it before we’d already started paint; a little dissapointing to realize our newly painted wall would become damaged goods once again. 

But then, another twist: As Uriah was about to begin hacking up the drywall for patchwork, when he said, “You know, I feel like I should tell you, I don’t think I would actually work at that desk”.

His complaint was the depth of the floating shelf, which I completely understand. However, it would look strange for the shelf to be much deeper, so we paused to rework our feature wall plan – and I think we came up with a good one.

Be sure to read Week 4’s post to see how this realization changed the design of the feature wall in the ORC of our master bedroom!

Thanks for following along, friends!

Get caught up with The Inspiring Investment’s Spring 2020 One Room Challenge! 

• Read Week 1’s post: before pictures and video walkthrough
• Read Week 2’s post: the design plan
• Week 3: lessons in paint (this post)