Reminder: You Get What You Pay For

Over the weekend, I did some painting to get prepared for the upcoming addition to our family.  We worked on three rooms:

• Little Boy Beagle’s new Big Boy room (the old guest bedroom)
• The new guest bedroom (the old office)
• Our master bathroom (nothing to do with the addition, we just realized we didn’t like the color)

I decided to tackle the projects in what I thought would be the most difficult first to the easiest last.

I started with the bathroom.

Bathrooms are just a pain.  You have a million corners and edges and things to paint around.  Still, that actually went pretty well, and we used the new Behr paint that is Paint & Primer in one, and it actually went on really good to the point where I didn’t need to do a second coat!  That’s always a bonus.  We went from a teal color to a slate gray, which looks good with our white fixtures, tiles, and counter.

The second room I tackled was Little Boy Beagle’s new room.  I ranked this second because I wasn’t sure if I would need two coats, plus it was the bigger of the two bedrooms.  Again, things went on pretty evenly.  I didn’t have to do a full second coat, though I did edge a full second time, and had a bunch of spots where there were slight spots of the old color.  All in all, not bad.

The room I had ready to go last was the one I thought would be the easiest.  We were keeping a similar color to what was there before, but decided to repaint because the walls had gotten a little scuffed around where the desk used to be, and we had a couple large shelves hung that left big patches to fill in after I filled in and sanded out the holes.

Still, we figured that one coat ought to do it.

When we were at Home Depot, we mentioned that we were looking for a gallon, and the lady pointed out that they were clearing out a brand of paint that they were replacing, and that the gallons were marked down to $10.

Red flags should have been going off, like asking “Why are they getting rid of it?”  But, the lure of 50-60% savings was overpowering, so we had them whip us up a gallon.  Same type of paint (latex), same finish (eggshell), and very close in color.  Should have been a breeze, right?

As soon as I started painting, I could tell that this wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought.  It seemed to be very wet, something that became even more apparent when the windows started fogging up due to all the humidity.  The high water content made it take a long time to dry and a second coat would be needed.

No problem, it’s not a really big room, so I figured I’d go to bed, wake up and tackle it.  When I went in the next morning, I almost threw up.  For whatever reason, the areas in the corners and edges that I had to do with the brush, looked horrible.  Now, I’ve painted a lot of rooms and I’ve gotten better at it as time has gone on, and I know that edges require some additional going-over, but this was not good.

I put on the second coat and second coat of edging.  After it all dried, I could STILL see the edges standing out.  Thankfully the rest of the walls looked pretty good after the second coat.

I had to do a THIRD coat of edging.  Arrgh.  I’ve NEVER had to do that.

This was supposed to be a one-coat quick-fix.

After the third coat, the edging looks….okay.  If you look close you can still see the difference, but given that it’s a guest room (read: hardly used) and given that the long-term plan is that it will one day be the ‘Big Kid’ room for Baby June Bug (i.e. we’ll need to re-paint it again in a few years, my wife and I decided we could live with it.

Still, the $15 that we saved on the paint….so NOT worth it!

I made a comment, though, that as bad as it was for one room, I couldn’t imagine painting a whole house with that.  There probably were people out there that, assuming this was a chain-wide change in strategy, saw that this stuff was on clearance and looked to get a whole lot done with little money.  Probably not.

Just a reminder that you get what you pay for AND that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.
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