painting the hall

There was no possibility of taking a walk today.  The clouds so sombre and the rain so penetrating didn't even wait until after dinner*, but ensconced themselves before breakfast, and looked set for the day.  I decided that it was time to paint the hall.  This has been on my list of things to do for a very long time.  I have even got as far as buying a glicee limited edition print from the Tate of an Edward Bawden lithograph of Liverpool Street Station (not full size.  The original is in the Fry gallery in Saffron Walden and it is enormous) and having it framed, with the intention of hanging it in the hall, instead of which it has been sitting propped against the bedroom wall for the past year.  In the depths of winter I couldn't face spending all that time in the freezing hall, and once the weather improved I was busy in the garden, but a wet and windy week in what passes for spring in England seemed the ideal time.

I have known people who buy little test pots of paint, and try them out, and spend ages agonising about the result.  I had a colleague who didn't like the colour of his kitchen when it was painted and did the whole thing again.  He may even have done it again twice, to get it exactly right.  I'm not that patient myself.  Choose a colour that looks hopeful, slap it on and live with the results is my method.  We did once spend a few years living with a kitchen that was a rather nasty acid shade of yellow (it faced north.  The yellow was supposed to brighten it up, but it didn't) but normally it works fine.  After all, there is no right answer when it comes to paint. I would rather it made me feel cheerful when I looked at it, rather than depressed or physically ill, but that still leaves a huge range of colours that would do perfectly well.

One wall of the inner part of the hall is covered with a green and red ethnic style rug (from Habitat, not an antique tribal one) which is there partly because I like rugs, but partly to cover a particularly dodgy bit of plasterwork.  It was quite tricky finding the rug, because it had to be large enough to hide the problem area, but not too large or it wouldn't fit on the wall.  A paint colour to pick out one of the colours in the rug seemed a good starting point.  Last time round I went for a bluish green that I think was described as Morris Blue, and staying somewhere in the blue-greens seemed the best bet, when I spent some time staring at paint charts about six months ago, the last time I was thinking about painting the hall.  After spending ten minutes looking at what was on offer in B&Q I decided that Natural Teal chalky emulsion would be just the job.

The wall where the reproduction lithograph is going to go used to have a set of framed black and white photos of wooden boats by a local photographer called Den Phillips.  They were cut out of her East Coast Calendar, which we have bought every year for more years than I care to remember.  She is a good photographer, and it seems a shame not to use some of the pictures from the old calendars, but after umpteen years we were getting bored of them, and they had an annoying tendency to blow off the wall when the door was propped open in the summer, smashing the frame plus anything fragile that happened to be on the hall table at a time.  I had the frame of the new print fitted with the side fastenings you can screw to the wall.  I think the framer called them mirror brackets.  It will be a challenge for the Systems Administrator to fasten the thing to the wall so that it's level, when I've finished painting.

The photographs were hung on substantial nails screwed into rawl plugs, the reason being that the hall wall was originally an exterior wall and there is solid brick 2mm under the plaster, so you can't bang in picture hooks in the normal way.  The screws undid easily with a little pair of mole grips, but it took me a little while to work out how to extract the first rawl plug (with a small skewer, carefully).  I filled the holes in with polyfilla, and while I was at it began to repair a gap in the door frame to the laundry that's been there since we had to remove the door frame to get the washing machine out when it finally broke down beyond all hope of repair.  Actually, we wasted a lot of money getting it repaired, and should have scrapped it about two years before we finally did.

Friends of ours took some time off over Easter to paint the upstairs of their new extension.  They are doing it properly, sanding down between coats.  I don't do that.  I didn't even sand off the polyfilla, just smoothed it down with the knife and gave it a rub with a wet cloth when it had finished setting.  The plasterwork in the hall is already pretty bad, pitted and scarred from fifty years' worth of hooks being hung and removed, and accidental contact with blunt objects.  If I got into the sanding lark I'd be at it until midsummer.  I have a theory that paint hides imperfections in the plaster, if it is strongly coloured enough.  On that basis we have a turmeric coloured downstairs loo, and a deep red study.  I also believe in taking the strongly coloured paint all over the ceiling.  The very nice woman who used to do our interior decorating for a while, until she moved away from the area, believed as an article of faith or convention that ceilings were white, and was rather taken aback when she discovered that I didn't want a study with red walls and a white ceiling, but one that was red all over (the walls are mostly covered with bookshelves anyway).

The first few brushfuls of Natural Teal looked a worrying shade of bright turquoise, which is one of my least favourite colours, but I told myself that I'd spent £21.98 on this, and that paint darkens as it dries.  It is darkening, to a good strong greenish blue, just as I'd hoped.  It is several shades darker than the old paint.  I thought that would be more exciting, and it might show the dirt less.  It will need two coats, and then there's the gloss to do, but today I got the first coat of emulsion on the outer hall, so I've made an appreciable dent on the task.  If it keeps raining into May as the Met Office is saying it could then I might even move on to the downstairs loo and the kitchen.  The kitchen is currently a slightly dubious shade of apricot tinged yellow (an attempt to brighten up an east facing room) but I have my eye on something the paint company calls Etruscan Red.  It is a soft reddish brown, just the thing to create a warming effect in a room that misses the sun for most of the day, and not clash with the Aga, or show the fly droppings on the ceiling too badly.  Flyshit Brown.  Now there's a name for paint.

*There is no cash prize, but award yourself a literary gold star if you get the reference.