You may remember me ranting on about my latest obsession with the color teal. The good news is you won’t have to listen to me gabbing about how I’d love to be adventurous enough to paint the interior of our apartment with this bold color anymore. After about 50 hours (of 2-3 people painting), 7 gallons of paint, and many roll brushes it is done! It was a huge learning experience and in the end saved us thousands of dollars by doing it ourselves. Below are some of my tips if you’re thinking of painting the interior of your home.

The first big lesson for us was patience. For the first time I painted swatches of many colors and let them just sit for a few weeks.  A very adult way to go about painting.  People would come over for a business meeting with my husband and wonder, “art project”? Not an art project, but a practice in patience to make sure we chose wisely and didn’t regret our choice in color.

Let’s talk about that annoying little process called priming. We didn’t take the time to prime because we figured we’d be fine painting a dark color over an existing light one. Kind of right and kind of wrong. Mostly wrong because if we had painted a coat of primer it would have made things (like the trim and ceiling) much easier to paint. The hardest part about painting our apartment was by far the trim. I don’t know how professionals do it, but I’d like to find out. Air brush? From far away it looks great but if you ever come visit please don’t look too closely. The best part about finally having a white ceiling and trim is that light reflects much better and brightens the room up.

The last, big lesson we learned was it’s all in the taping. Taping before you paint may be one of the more annoying things to do in life. It’s really time consuming, hard to get just right, and tiring to crouch or climb a ladder over and over again. What I learned however was that taping dictates how your paint job will look in the end. If you tape in a perfectly straight line and take the time to line up each piece of tape then you’re going to have a gorgeous paint job in the end. I think it’s fair to say that taping is the most important step about painting interiors.

If you asked me what my favorite thing is about this color it would be that it looks totally different throughout the stages of the day. At times it looks very green and at night it tends to like dark navy. Juliet said it best, “It’s like the colors of the ocean throughout the day”. Now, we just have to find some more artwork to decorate these gorgeous teal walls!