Fixing an Ooops Paint Job

We have a print by Wassily Kandinsky that has been the inspiration for the colors we've painted our rooms on the ground floor. We have a green kitchen, a purple living room, and someday, we'll have a yellow music room (we've had the paint for this room for over a year, but moving the piano was not an option while I was pregnant and it's been pushed aside since the midget was born). When it comes time to sell our house, we'll be doing a LOT of painting!!

I'm not sure why we are drawn to this painting so deeply. Being a Concrete Random, perhaps it is the complete mess of very particular objects.

We've been meaning to paint the hallway that leads from our garage to the kitchen for a long time. We've lived in our house for over a year and there are lots of rooms that are still builder white. We use this entrance to our house the most, so it was dirty, scraped up, and UGLY! I knew I wanted to paint it orange-red (let's just say I'm not a very neutral person in ANY way), so we went off to the hardware store with the color in mind. We found what we thought was the perfect color, we bought it, and came home. I knew the moment hubby started painting the walls that the color was wrong, wrong, WRONG! It looked like circus tent orange!! Hubby thought it was fine--he'd apply a second coat and it would dry darker. But I knew it wasn't going to change that dramatically, even with another coat.

Once it dried, the hubbster asked if we could keep the hallway "Tony Stewart orange." By the way, do any of your husbands torture you with Nascar ALL weekend long? Seriously, it's basically a soap opera for men and all that noise gives me a headache!

I remembered seeing shows where glazes were applied to paint to tone down colors and started doing some research. I didn't want to have to re-tape the entire hall, so I decided to sponge on the glaze. While researching how to sponge, Lowe's website came up during my search and I found the perfect product! Lowe's Valspar Signature Collection Translucent Color Glaze required no mixing and would give me up to 45 minutes to work with it!

When I went to Lowe's, they had a nice section for faux finishes and had great brochures for "how-to" (I found their great brochure online here after I finished the project, but thought I'd share it with you because it has the best directions for using their product) and all the necessary tools were in one place! I did find it hard to choose the glaze because they didn't have any samples or examples of what the glaze would look like. I had brought along the paint chip of our color and what would have been quite helpful is tinted plastic to place over the top of the paint chip. But the two glazes I was choosing between happened to have their little tops popped (guess I wasn't the only one who had trouble figuring out what the glaze would look like), so I took my finger and dabbed each of the glazes on to the paint chip and let them dry for a while.

I bought the Burnt Sienna glaze, a sea sponge, two small disposable trays, latex disposable gloves, and four practice boards for $35. Granted I spent more than it would have cost for another gallon of paint, but I will have all the supplies I'll need for many more sponging projects.

I started the sponging right after I laid the midget down for her morning nap and was finished by the time she woke up (ninety minutes). I only had to do minimal taping on the places that were tight and used a trim shield for the rest. The glaze was easy to use and a snap to clean off when I made a mistake. I used a magic eraser to get a few splotches off the ceiling's flat white paint, but the glaze came off of the high-gloss trim with just a wet cloth.

Here's the color before and after. Pretty dramatic, eh?