A splash of color...or not.

I've put off painting the house since we moved in. It had been recommended to us when we first moved in, not to paint until we'd been here for at least a year - to give the house a chance to settle and avoid having to deal with cracks in the plaster after we'd already painted. So we waited. But then, once we'd moved in and all of our stuff was in the house, the idea of moving everything one room at a time wasn't really on my list of favorite weekend activities. So we put it off. And we put it off.

But this weekend I finally bit the bullet and started painting. I began in Meged's room as any day now she'll have her new desk delivered and I didn't really want to have that to move as well. So I left the three big kids to basically fend for themselves, tossed Holly in bed for her nap and proceeded to paint. It went fairly smoothly at first. I got three walls painted and began the fourth. That's when it happened.

The roller fell apart. And I'm too stubborn to just leave a wall partially painted and come back to it the next day when a replacement roller has been acquired. Besides, I didn't want to risk leaving a permanent line on the wall where I'd stopped and then needed to restart once the paint was already dry. But although I searched everywhere I could think of, I couldn't find any of my regular sized (meaning decent enough to justify painting a wall with) paint brushes. So what did I do, you may ask? Well, I'll tell you. I used one of my one-inch round craft brushes. To paint an entire wall. Yes. I know. I'm insane.

But...I got the job done. The next morning, however, I did hop over to our local hardware store. This time, though, I decided to avoid scraping the floor tiles for all of the roller splatter and opted for a sponge pad instead. I don't believe in using plastic drop cloths. And I don't have old sheets I'm willing to ruin. So I'd prefer to scrape than use unnecessary plastic. But I'd rather not scrape at all if it can be avoided by changing equipment. Sure, there were some drips with the sponge, but those were easy to get off the floor.

Now I have two bedrooms painted and three more to go - plus, of course, the hallway, bathrooms, living room, dining room and kitchen. But the bedrooms are the most important, so I'll focus on that for now and see how things progress regarding the rest of the house. Maybe I'll put that off until next summer!