Mean Green Bookcase Painting Machine

I’m getting ahead of myself tonight with this project.  Or maybe I’m just REALLY behind.  Depends on how you look at it.  Kind of like one of those glass is half empty or half full kind of deals.  So I painted a bookcase green and plopped it into the guest bedroom.  Game day bucket go boom!

There is no other furniture in the guest bedroom (no bed, no nightstand, no curtains, no light fixture) and we haven’t even finished polying the floors (but I’m holding out for a slightly warmer weekend for that stinky job so we can open all the windows and air out).  But we have a bookcase.  That’s the getting ahead of myself part.  Painting a bookcase green really wasn’t high on the priority list and it was just one of those “on a whim” projects.  So what’s the getting behind part of this story?  Colby built the bookcase for me back in February…wait for it…of 2012.

The above pic is the old picture I took of the bookcase.  So you can kind of see a completely different looking living room behind it.   The bookcase was originally built for the parlor to store Colby’s work related stuff on, since he works from home, but after Colby built it, we scrapped that idea altogether and deemed the bookcase appropriate for the guest room.  So it sat in the basement for a year.

And remember yesterday how I was telling you that not staining/finishing wood is bad?  Yeah…this was really bad!  We (and by we I totally mean Colby) had to repair a few spots where the wood split.  It was nothing that some glue, a few extra screws and some wood putty couldn’t fix.  Anyway…I had just barely started priming the pine bookcase when I came up with my color idea…why not take the green from one of the color inspiration napkins for the bookcase color?!  Just call me Albert Einstein…genius!

So I went to our local Aubuchon Hardware store, who carries Benjamin Moore paint (my new personal favorite paint), and pulled swatches and asked for help until we found the perfect color match for the napkin color called…spoiler alert…prepare to be completely unimpressed…Yellow Green.  Seriously…could that color name get any more boring?!  But I guess I was overdue for a boring color name since my last pick was an exciting Himalayan Trek shade.  So home I came from the store with two quarts…one of tinted primer and the other Yellow Green paint in a semi gloss.

This was my first experience with tinted primer.  And I’m not gonna lie, I had no idea there was such thing as tinted primer.  It never occurred to me that some paint colors simply required a darker primer base to help the top coat color cover better.  To get an idea of helpful using a tinted primer can be with more saturated shades, with the tinted primer I went with one coat tinted primer and two coats of green instead of one coat white primer and six to eight coats of green.

After just one coat of tinted primer on the bookcase, I was jonesing for warmer weather so I could break out the paint sprayer and spray this bad boy.  It took me nearly two hours just to prime it with a brush thanks to all the nooks and crannies and funny angles to this thing.  Painting gods…if you can hear me…please make summer come stat!  I want to paint outside with the new paint sprayer that I purchased late fall…in Maine…after spray painting season was over…doh!

One of the things I love about Benjamin Moore paint (at least the kinds I’ve tried so far) is how fast the paint dries.  By the time I finished priming the bookcase, it was dry enough for paint.  So after having a minor panic attack at how yellow the paint looked in the can (it dried more green like), I dove right into the painting of the bookcase.

Two coats and one Goose photo bomb later, I had a finished, painted bookcase.

And naturally, despite still needing a few more coats of poly on the floor, I moved the bookcase up to its new home in the guest bedroom, along the wall beside the door.

Here’s a better angle so you can see the bookcase placement better (and no…we don’t normally keep our bathroom door closed and no…Colby isn’t in there taking care of business…if you know what I mean…we just dumped some drain cleaning stuff down the tub drain to rid it of Goose hairs…the stuff does not agree with Gooses and one of Goose’s favorite places to hang out is the bathtub…I know, weird, right?!).

And because I couldn’t possibly move a bookcase into a room without temporarily styling it to get an idea of what the space may look like in the end, I bring you a pseudo styled bookcase.  Pseudo in that the flowers came from the dining room table and the baskets came from the bathroom.

What I’m about to confess to you is shocking, so consider yourself warned.  I…am…out…of…extra…accessories!  OMG…OMG…OMG!  I usually keep a cabinet in the kitchen full of random accessories that don’t yet have a permanent space to live in our home.  The cabinet is empty folks…I repeat…the cabinet is empty.  Somebody needs to go shopping…I hear Home Goods calling my name!

On another note…I’ve been doing a little bathroom thinking as we’re progressing along our “finish the damned second floor already” mission.  I’m not convinced our yellow bathroom is here to stay, especially once we finish the guest bedroom.  I’m starting to think the green/coral bedroom offers no flow as you look into a yellow/white bathroom.  Thoughts?  Anyone?  I still love my yellow bathroom…but its days may be numbered.

Pssst…On a completely random, totally unrelated note, I’ve been reading this book called “Can We Pretend This Never Happened” by Jenny Lawson, otherwise known as The Blogess.  And finished the book…in two days.  And I couldn’t stop larting (that’s laugh-farting) combined with absolute uncontrollable laughter (particularly when I read the 5′ chicken story).  What is wrong with me?!  Anyone else read it?  That book killed me!