What to do when paint doesn't match?

[threemonkeys]

This is my third go at trying to post, website it keeps reloading mid post.

Paint job is too big and I'm getting conflicting advice on how to solve it. Attaching pictures I'll try to repost in the comments.

 

 

 

[threemonkeys]

This "simple painting job" has blown out to a month. I have most of the painting equipment already purchased to prep the walls and I just bought four litres of paint only to get it home and realize it's the wrong colour. Bunnings mixed that colour up for me and told me I would need four litres to make sure I had enough coverage for the bathroom. I can't use that paint anywhere else, I'm just about to bin $70 worth of paint, I can't afford to do that! Is a tiny studio apartment I would have thought I would only have needed two litres at most for an ensuite sized bathroom considering the doors and frames are going to be a different colour.

I'm prepared to throw another one or two hundred dollars more at this but that's it. I've got plumbing to do, I've got electricals to do, half the things in this place don't work, it's looking like I'm going to have to do my own plumbing and electrical because the contractors in the inner city charge at the top end of the range and it's well outside what I can afford. The paint should be the least of my worries but right now I'm living in a filthy place where nothing works and I can't find anything, my life is on hold until I can get enough of its stowed away that it functions like anything resembling accommodation. I can't move out, I need to get this place into a livable standard.

[EricL]

Hello @threemonkeys 

I'm sorry to hear you got the wrong paint colour. Please allow me to reach out to you through private messaging so that I can offer you further assistance.

Eric

[threemonkeys]

That would be great thanks 

[threemonkeys]

I got it sorted out, the colour has come up nice. I was pretty happy with the colours and lack of fumes from the paint (Taubmans), it's the sort of thing that would normally give me a headache.

Attached are some of the issues I ran into with the prep before I even got to the painting. A previous tenant had a unvented drier in there and it looks like at some point it's been flooded too, the bathroom walls and ceilings were pretty much a write off with big sheets of skim coat and plaster peeling off, it went back to masonry in some places. I also had cracks to fill that turned out to be deceptively large beneath previous attempts to repair them, I'm pretty sure I got fixed properly this time with foam in the largest sections, a caulking designed for areas that have a little bit of movement and the shallower parts, a skim coat to even it out and primer.

I didn't manage to get everything completely smooth, I would have needed power tools but after finding the electrical wire so close to the surface I was not inclined to use anything that could potentially cause damage should I come across another one of those.

I'll touch it up anywhere that's a bit rough when I go to paint next time. Main thing is I got all the various layers of wall addressed, the walls are all sealed up again and all the one colour.

All the fixtures, hinges etc were painted in, I managed to get them off with the help of paint stripper and soaked them in boiling water to peel the paint off. The doors were a nightmare because they had painted water-based paint over oil which was peeling off in sheets and the doors were the very slippery pre painted kind to start with, I had to sand them back and prime them before I could paint them.

The pipe was capped off but I still had a hole to deal with. A dilution of PVA for the crumbly masonry, expanding foam for the void around the pipe, followed by several layers of multipurpose filler, topped off with a couple of layers of skim coat, then primer then paint. Took a while for everything to dry in between the layers, I think I added a couple of weeks just on that one. 

Back to the plaster in some places and all the way back to the masonry in others. A nice big electrical wire sitting behind that one too.

Pretty standard neglected bathroom ceiling, only this one nobody bothered to scrape it off they just added several thousand layers of paint over it. I had a go at sanding it back and filling it with a skim coat but I don't think it will ever be flat or the proper shape around the cornices again. I'll be surprised if it's not rotten through in places, I won't know how bad until the electrician comes out to fix the fan but it is painted now, at least it will stop it getting worse than it was.

Nobody had ever fixed the cracks properly, it was just all full of roughly applied bog. Builder said it's not a load bearing wall and just part of the movement of the building so purely cosmetic. Still looked pretty scary though and there were several of them in the usual places.