If you have seen all kinds of videos and read atleast 10 blogs and are still confused as to whether or not or how to paint your own home- this is where your doubts can rest in peace. This is the holy grail of painting your own house and it has every thing from foam roller sizes to what kind of paint, how to paint it, the cost and the time involved. This also has what to do if you are painting over distemper or going light on dark walls. I will also give you the amount of paint required and why you should believe me blindfolded.
My hands are still sore from painting our home and tired hands don’t lie
On a certain Tuesday, my man Friday and I waited for a good 4 hours by the window of our newly rented apartment, wondering what happened to our appointed painter. He was to see us at 11 am and take over the painting of the said home. It’s a fairly big space and we thought we wouldn’t have the time or the expertise to do this ourselves. I mean I have painted walls before but a wall or two. Not an entire home of over 750sqft! But unfortunately he thought it was truly gentlemanly of him to lie to us and switch his phone off there after. He never turned up and we spent half of our day for absolutely nothing.
Now, see this is the sort of thing that gets me
I cannot deal with people who say they will and don’t. This does not work with me at all. The other is when they tell me I won’t be able to do it. Post this disaster we tried calling a few more painters who gave me a mad quote on the painting. One of them went as far as to say that, “madam, aap se nahi hoga. Ye bohot difficult hain”.
I came home and told Rohan the whole thing. The next day we decided to paint the home ourselves. Because the only problem with life is the amount of variable we need to deal with. Fuck that.
Paint: What we got, the shades, number of coats, mixing the paint with water and cost
We wanted to paint the entire house white minus the living room wall which was to be a warm grey.
Shades: We got Asian Paints apcolite base white and iceage 8299.
Why a water based plastic paint or emulsion and not something cheaper like Tractor?
Because A. Tractor emulsion is part distemper and part plastic paint. It is not washable. B. If you have undulated walls the matte finish hides it quite a bit. C. Apcolite lasts longer and doesn’t need retouch for atleast 4 years.
Liters: A standard wall requires 1 liters of paint. So going by that our 3 bedroom + hall and dining would need 12 + 5 walls if you are not doing ceiling. So we got 1 x 20 liter white base apcolite and 2 liters of Ice age (wanted one extra). It was perfect. We didn’t run out on paint neither did we have a lot left over.
Number of coats: 2. or 3 if you have a super dark walls.
Mixing the paint: Mix 60% to 70% water with paint and apply thin coats with brush. Then smoothen it out with foam roller. For example, if you take 1 liter paint, add 600 ml of water. And so on. Too thick and it will cake. Too thin and it’ll drip.
Demystifying Foam Rollers and Brush
Foam rollers: Simple rollers available in 9″ and 6″ sizes are the best rollers ever. They come for 60 bucks, they finish the paint perfectly and are the type of rollers I would recommend. Add paint in parts with your 4″ brush and then smoothen with roller.
Cotton rollers– 1/2″ nap: If you are adding paint directly to walls, most stores recommend you to take a these sort of rollers. I’ll vote against it. The cotton rollers get heavy when dipped with paint, leaves texture on the walls. Most importantly if you are starting with a new roller it will drench you in paint sprays. We saw multiple youtube videos which asked us to get 1/2 naps and we were struggling! Haha.
Brush size: Get two sizes. One 4″ large and one 1″ for corners. Any company will do. I used royale because I already had one lying around.
Cost of supplies
20 liter apcolite can cost you anywhere between 5800 to 8000. Buy from a wholeseller. I bought it from APMC market.
1 liter royale will cost you around 700 bucks. Great paint but slightly expensive.
1/2″ nap rollers, 9″ costs you 400 bucks each. Piece of shit
Brushes comes around 100 to 200 bucks. Depending on the inch.
What to do if you are painting over distemper
Very thankfully, our current home was painted with probably tractor so we had a good head start. We didn’t need scrubbing or primer. We could just go ahead and start painting. But that also meant we needed more than 2 coats in two rooms- the orange and the green one.
If you are painting over distemper, it’s either a fresh coat of distemper or scrub the distemper down, add primer and then give it a coat of water based plastic paint.
Drying time
Each coat will take about 3 to 4 hours to dry. Which means start from one room x one coat then move on and then come back!
3 important hacks
Start painting from the top. Paint drips and if you start from the bottom, you’ll have to smoothen the paint below later.
Tie a scarf on your hair! Paint makes your hair dry
The dry paint can be scraped with a tin putty knife.
What do you do if your existing paint is too dark?
For this part however you will have to read this blog that I wrote last year. It has all the nittigritties that you will need to know about painting over dark walls. We re-did our walls last year and it was a breeze!
And now that you know everything you need to know about painting your own home, go do it. It’s fun, it’s also legit work out!
Off for coffee, Byeeee
Rukmini
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