Painting the Second Floor

When we painted our living room and dining room, we did a lot of research on the brand of paint to buy and the type of finish. We wrestled with which shade of white to choose and how shiny our trim paint should be. Now that we’ve settled on those details, we just had to choose our paint colour and buy the paint.

When we purchased our paint last time, we bought enough primer, ceiling paint and trim paint to do both the downstairs and upstairs, so we only had to buy the wall paint.

We decided to choose Chantilly Lace for the walls and even decided to repaint downstairs because we were never really satisfied with the grey.

New Walls

Before we could start painting, we had some drywalling to do. We hired a drywaller but also had a lot of our own work to do in getting it paint ready. And if you haven’t read about the distaster our drywaller was, it’s worth the read.

Cleaning the Walls

Once the walls were completely smooth, we cleaned them thoroughly with TSP.

Priming

Just like last time, we started by priming the entire room – walls, ceilings and trim. We used the same primer from our downstairs paint job: Para’s SuperStick.

Painting

Then came painting. We started by painting the ceiling, which was just as annoying and back-breaking as last time, but at least we knew what to expect. We also had enough leftover paint from downstairs: Benjamin Moore’s Waterborne Ceiling Paint in Chantilly Lace so we didn’t have to get any new paint.

We finished it off by painting the walls. In the master bedroom and hallway, we chose Benjamin Moore’s Regal Select interior paint, ulti-matte finish (the second most matte finish) in Chantilly Lace (the same colour as the ceiling and trim). We bought enough to cover the entire second floor.

Once the rooms were fully painted, we finished by painting the trim. We first had to do some small repairs on the window and door trim by caulking large gaps or cracks. We used some backer rod to fill the large gaps and then caulked. 

We’re waiting until all of the rooms are painted and the baseboards are installed before we paint our trim. But getting the coats of paint on the walls made a huge difference. It’s been 5 months of painting in phases, but we’re finally done all the walls! It’s starting to feel like we might be getting to the end of living in constant construction!