Browned off

If I thought last Saturday's efforts were a marathon, nothing could have prepared me for yesterday.

I'd intended to make an early start to put the final coat on the cornice (the first coat went on in two stages during the week) and finish that before breakfast so I could progress to the colour - the bit we'd all been waiting for. Ha! I hadn't appreciated just how long it would take for the whole room. Thing is, the cornice is so detailed it effectively has nine surfaces to be painted. So each metre takes nine times as long as a metre of, for example, skirting board. I started at 7.30 and didn't finish until 11am. A late breakfast then.

Although breakfast was a leisurely affair - when the girls are here we like to take our time, chew and chat as it were - it wasn't long enough for the cornice to have skinned over, so I started the edge work below the picture rail. We went through four different choices of colour for this room, trying to find a brown that was rich and warm without being too dark. Our final choice still didn't have our full confidence, so we only had one tin mixed up just in case it proved wrong. We needn't have worried. It was clear even at this early stage that it was perfect.

But again, my estimates of elapsed time were way off. I expected to have finished the first coat by mid-afternoon, but I was having to take much greater care with the brown than I had with the white undercoat. I wanted to get the edges as near perfect as I could, which meant very slow progress with the brush along the edge of the picture rail (although the bottom edge wasn't so critical, since I always leave skirting boards 'til last).

By around 1pm I'd completed the lower section of walls and graduated to the upper section. Here progress proved even slower. Now I had two critical edges - cornice and picture rail - and I was working on a plank. I decided to complete both edging and rollering in one circuit, but this slowed me down even further, as I had to keep swapping from brush to roller. It was after 5 by the time the upper section was complete, but having already worked for so long I was determined to finish the whole room in one day.

I finally completed the bottom section rollering at 6.40, having worked for eleven hours with only a short break for breakfast. Even though this is the first coat (of two), the coverage of this paint is excellent and we were very pleased with the result. The photo doesn't really do it justice. It was starting to get dark and I had to use flash. Imagine that Wedgewood's Jasperware comes in brown - oh, hang on (*checks Google*), it does - so yeah, it's that kind of effect. That powder-brown (cf powder-blue) matt effect against the crisp white of Jasperware, during daylight, and in artificial light it takes on a wonderful rich, warm, chocolatey aspect which is exactly what we were trying to achieve.

It needs a second coat, but that's a job for another day. Me? I'm taking the day off to recuperate!