Painted the Laundry Room / Mud Room

Posted on July 5th, 2011 in Painting

The laundry/mud room got painted this weekend. What in the world could one do with a really long weekend? Why paint, of course! D’oh! We got tired of seeing how crappy the entry way looked so I decided to pick up some paint and stuff needed to paint the room.

The room is part burnt-orange paint on cracked plaster, part unpainted drywall, and part burnt orange on drywall. The doors looked horrible so we painted one, and the other one was so bad that we pulled it off and stripped the paint with chemical stripper. It’s still sitting on the front porch waiting for a final sanding and some coats of paint and new hinges, but it will look nice.

In the pictures below you see the old room and may think the orange isn’t super terrible, but that’s with the camera flash. Imagine that orange with a single 60 watt lightbulb in the middle of the room, dimly lit.

Bleah! terrible looking, plus the drill press and tons of junk stacked on top of the dryer (great table to have next to the drill press.)

We sanded and removed the dust from the drywall, patched the cracks, sanded those and cleaned the dust then painted the walls with a nice white flat latex paint. We went to paint the ceiling with rollers and the paint on the ceiling started peeling! We switched to brushes which didn’t peel the paint, but after 2-3 hours huge sections of the previous ceiling paint were just falling off the ceiling onto the floor.

We ended up scraping as much of the original paint of the ceiling as possible, most of it just peeled like the skin of a grape, leaving a perfectly brown surface. For some reason the previous owner had put the drywall in with the brown side down. I’m guessing he probably bought some damaged drywall cheap that only had a good bottom side and figured it was good enough.

Since we wasted almost a gallon on the ceiling, which then peeled off, I just bought some more of the white bonding primer I had been using on the outside of the house. It looks great on the sealing and soaked into the paper, it won’t peel off now!

We painted the trim in a color called ‘portico’ I think it still needs another coat but it’ll look nice when it’s completely finished. Here you can see some of the shots of the new paint.

It’s amazing how much nicer it is. Even with just that one 60-watt light bulb the room is still extremely bright and well lit. When we come home it’s more like ‘ahh I’m home’ than ‘Agh! I’m home’ feeling. Soothing colors. We’re thinking of doing the hallway (now a wheat color with white trim) in the same color and combining it into the steps somehow since the upstairs hallway is all white as well.