Builders. Grade. Paint.

In case you did not know, these are very dirty words, at least to this home owner. This paint is builders grade flat paint, and as you can see, it goes right up my stairway. While this might not seem like a big deal to most people, if you look closely you can see the biggest problem with this HORRIBLE cheap type of paint: you CANNOT clean this stuff! I took this picture after trying to scrub the hallway with Magic Erasers, and old school soap and water, with very lack luster results. The other issue with flat paint is that is sucks the light out of any space that it’s in, which is no help to a hallway with no windows!

After about a week of living with the half-washed walls, and the carpet that wouldn’t get cleaner than this for love or money, I told my hubby that the nasty hallway was having a “negative effect on my mental health”. You have to understand that I go up and down these stairs at least 30 times a day, and with so much other work going on in our house I needed ONE area that looked nice… One area that I could walk through and smile because it was “Done”… So I decided it was going to be those nasty stairs, with that horrid flat paint, and it all had to go. NOW!

Luckily for me, the walls were in good shape. For the first time in years I was able to prime without having to spend a week patching something first!

Now, even though I could have technically skipped the primer because I was going right over flat paint, we ALL KNOW that this is a TERRIBLE idea. You should NEVER skip primer if you want your walls to turn out the color that you actually chose and not some weird, bled through hybrid of the two…

It took me a little more than a week to paint the walls and the chair rail; the chair rail had been put in at some point and was preprimed but never painted, make no mistake, I had a very good time doing some ladder-scaffolding yoga in this stairway. My hubby and I took up the disgusting carpet after the painting was done and were rewarded by something we were not expecting…