I scrapped the plan of painting our studio apartment from yellow to off-white, rather opting for a lighter shade of green. Mon and I were to meet at 10 AM in SM Makati but I was late because I had to walk from about a block near Ali Mall until MRT. Traffic enforcers were re-routing the vehicles but as I saw that the way ahead had a serious traffic jam, I just decided to walk. However, I was not prepared to see this disaster, and it caused me to arrive around 11 AM to my destination.
We first had an early lunch because we would be having a long day ahead of us, and besides, it would have been too cumbersome to carry all of the materials we bought to the foodcourt. I have never been inside this ACE Hardware and I had a great time looking at things I wished I could all buy. But we had limited funds and space, that was just wishful thinking. Aside from buying painting materials, we also bought cleaning materials to finally rid the apartment of the thick dust that has enveloped it during those few months of being uninhabited.
We have already agreed on a lighter shade of green, i.e. mint green and the aisle dedicated to paints had a lot of greens to choose from, but honestly, the really pale ones looked just white to me. LOL We picked this bucket of Davies’ paint called ‘Merry Mint‘ and I was hoping that it was enough because we had no time to go back to ACE Hardware again to buy more.
We almost started painting as soon as we arrived, but we forgot to buy an important equipment: an electric fan. We will be painting a room with limited ventilation, and as we did not want to suffocate from the fumes, I had to rush to the nearest PureGold just to buy one. Well, what was supposedly a momentary trip became an hour because the staff who assisted me took forever to find the box in the storage room. In the end, the electric fan was stuffed inside a big box of Piattos, and the guard took a long time inspecting it before letting me exit. All of that for a fan.
I got back to the apartment and Mon had already finished putting on masking tape on the corners of walls and fixtures to prevent them from being accidentally painted over. I was just in time to help painting and I was first not sure with how the paint was clinging onto the yellow walls. After finally putting on the first coat over every yellow surface, I could still see a slight yellow tinge beneath the new paint.
But we began putting on the second coat over the biggest wall, I was very pleased to see that the mint green has indeed taken over and it looked beautiful. There was one drawback, though. I don’t know what to exactly call that color in the bottom-most part of the wall, where it meets the floor, but the paint was ‘mixing’ with the already existing brown that the resulting surface looked messy. We have also bought a smaller can of paint, in a darker shade of green to paint over that brown part. However, we had to wait until Friday before attempting to paint it again, hoping that there will be no reaction and the darker green will sit well on top of it.
After almost five hours of painting, there were almost no yellow surfaces (except for tiny yellow patches where the wall meets the ceiling) and we were both delighted to see the end result. Granted that we had to repaint the built-in cabinets because dark green gave a horrendous outcome, and we also had to deal with that ‘skirting’ on the wall, I got more excited moving in because of the no-longer-yellow walls. We had originally asked the landlady to repaint the apartmetn and we’d just pay for the labor, but good thing it was still not carried out because we actually did not mind painting it on our own.
