Half-Baked and Fed Up

Trudging along towards ultimate water softener installation .  . .

I got the problem area primed with Kilz on Tuesday.  But no, my previous owners didn't leave me any of the flat white basement wall paint.  Wottoodoo, wottoodoo . . .  I didn't want to have buy a whole new gallon of paint for that little corner, but a quart always seems like a bad deal.

Well, here's this:  I had a whole gallon of flat white, untinted, that I got on sale last Fall.  It's for redoing the ceiling up in my study.  I don't need all of it for up there . . . maybe I could use part of it for repainting the basement wall in the water softener corner.  I'd pretty much decided on the shade of white I want for the 3rd floor, and I brought the chip down the basement and held it against the old paint. Yeah, good enough.

So I got the paint tinted yesterday and had a packet of anti-mildew powder added in.  This morning I added some perlite grit (which the POs did leave me) to a quart of it to match the existing texture, and got to work.

Yes.  Well.  It really looks nice where the new paint is.  But it isn't a match to the old paint by any stretch of the imagination.

I don't regret going with the color I want for the 3rd floor.  It couldn't've matched the existing basement walls unless I wanted my study ceiling to be dirty tan.  What I do regret is not foreseeing this, and failing to wash down the entire wall while I had the bucket of TSP going.  Actually, I should have washed down both the outside wall and the one behind the washer and dryer.  Because both of them will have to be repainted to make the basement laundry room look decent, and it has to be done before the new water treatment equipment is installed.

And if I'm going to do a sensible and proper job of it, I have to scrape down that scabby area the other side of the window where it looks like some cabinet used to be and it never got painted the white like the rest of the room.  Or maybe it was humid behind it and the paint came off.  Whatever.  I see it'll have to be scraped, washed, and done.

Oh! oh! I was so hoping to have this step finished today so I could get on with the floor!  Now I have to go buy more TSP, and I can't use it for two or three days because the new paint has to harden up a little before I go scrubbing over it, because of course the dirty spots are above it, oh, yeah . . .

Tell me, when does the fun begin, anyway?