Memorandum Monday

It's the first day of the half term holidays over here in Deb's World and a busy day it's been too.  But never to busy to join in with Sian's Memorandum Monday.

 

But before I tell you the new thing I tried today, we need to first set the scene.  Let me take you back to the summer of 2007.  It wasn't a good summer for my son, in fact it was a summer he's probably pushed to the back of his mind.  AS exams had been taken, results would be arriving at the end of the summer holidays.  His first serious girlfriend had broken up with him and he failed his driving test.  Things were looking very bleak. 

In an effort to cheer himself up and make some changes, he asked if he could decorate his bedroom.  After a week of being totally despondent and just sitting around moping, we were happy to let him choose his own colour scheme and do his first bit of decorating, a nice project to do over the summer and keep him busy.  He went off to Homebase and came home with two tins of paint.  One a neutral cream and one blue.  One dark blue.  Very dark blue.  Endurance paint - with a shiny surface which you could scrub ('they didn't do it in any other finish and I liked the colour')  I loathed it.  But he loved it and he had such enthusiasm I didn't like to suggest maybe we return it for another colour. 

 

The plan was for friends to come and help him and to give them their credit, they rallied round, painted a first coat on all walls then went off with him to Subway for lunch and never returned.

 

While they were gone I looked at the patchy cream walls and quickly ran another coat over those.  Jon returned for dinner, declared himself thrilled with the lighter walls ( I kept the information about their 2nd coat to myself) and promised to finish off the darker ones the next day. 

 

Which he did.  Well, he did one of them but it's not so much fun without your mates to help out and then someone rang and asked if he wanted to go into town and ... you can guess the rest.  I finished off the 4th wall, put the furniture back and it's stayed that way ever since. 

 

Time came and went and so did he.  Three years in Sheffield at Uni, home for a year then off to Edinburgh for two years, home for six months then setting up home in London 18 months ago.  He's always joked that I was not to turn his room into a craft room or rent it out to a lodger as you never know when he might want to come back. 

 

Every time I go into that room (which is gradually turning into a room in which I store my craft equipment, which is not the same as turning it into a craft room is it?) I look at those dark walls and reach for the paint charts.  I said to him at the weekend 'You're getting married next year, you're living in London, you are clearly not coming back here to live, I'm going to decorate your room in half term', he smiled, gave me a big grin and said 'ok then, just don't make it pink'.

 

Now it just so happens that we had half a tin of the paint left over from the dining room and it would be a shame to throw it away so ...

 

Before

During

Only problem was, there wasn't enough paint left in the tin.  That blue?  Horrendously difficult to cover up.  The word 'patchy' doesn't even come close.  After half a wall it was blatantly obvious that one cover up coat was never going to be sufficient.  But Farrow and Ball paint doesn't come cheap and doesn't some in small tins.  I didn't want to spend out on another 2.5 litres when I only needed 1 litre at the most so I tried something new.  Well it was Memorandum Monday after all, I needed to try something I hadn't done before so

 

I had some Dulux paint colour matched to copy the colour from the F&B colour chart.

 

 

 

It was all very high tech with scanners to copy the colour from the paint chart and squirts of various shots of colours added to the base, seal the tin, give it a good old shake and voila we had a cheap copy of an expensive paint.  It will be interesting to see how it compares when we come to put it on the wall tomorrow.  Watch this space.

Have you tried anything new in the last week?  Why not pop over to Sian's and share it with all the Memo Makers?