Big Decisions in Painting the Tiny Home

This is part of our Tiny House, Tiny Bloggers series, in which we turn over Plaster & Disaster to some VERY tiny bloggers to tell their own story of transforming an ugly, old (doll)house into a fresh and modern (doll)home. Follow it from the beginning here.

Disclaimer: Inclusion on this blog is not an endorsement by Plaster & Disaster of the tiny blogger’s methods or design decisions. Plaster & Disaster cannot be held responsible for your terrible decor choices after reading one of their tutorials. All opinions are their own.

Tiny bloggers here! We’ve been working on a lot of bummer, no fun, lot of work projects in our (doll)home lately, so we’re really anxious to start having somethign to show for it. From what you’ve seen so far, you probably think buying this place was a huge mistake!

Here is what it looked like after we bravely took on our own electrical work. (Seriously, I don’t think we got enough credit from you guys about how brave that was.)

But even with the over-sized Christmas lights gone (Editor’s note: these were normal-sized Christmas lights, the tiny bloggers are prone to hyperbole), the house was still looking pretty rough. We knew that the next step absolutely had to be some fresh paint on the walls. We weren’t sure what color to go with, but we knew that we would have to prime as a first step anyway so we got to work. I know it’s tempting to jump right into painting, but the prep work is so important even if it adds extra time. Because we were doing our whole house, we spent an entire extra hour just on prep work if you can believe it.

First we collected our supplies.

We like to work with Zinsser 1-2-3 Bullseye primer, and a gallon can go a really long way — probably enough for an entire neighborhood, frankly. We like to buy in bulk to save money, but the downside was that navigating with the paint can was tough since it was too large to even fit through the doorways. But we made do, and it was so satisfying to see the primer going on.

One thing we didn’t worry about was getting paint on the floors, since we’ve decided to put down totally new floors after this. The orangey-wood tone of the current floors just isn’t doing it for us. We plan to lay the new flooring ourselves, so stay tuned!

Anyway, back to this project. Next it was time to caulk.

Just like Sage, we were definitely intimidated by the caulk gun…that thing is massive. BUT, you guys it really is worth learning a scary new tool sometimes to get the right results with your project. And caulking makes such a difference. Here you can see some of the seams in our walls before and after caulking:

Some of those cracks were big enough to potentially be structural concerns, but but with the caulk it’s like they’re not even there. Sage and Naomi assure us our house won’t fall down.

With the prep work done, it was finally time to paint! We weren’t actually sure what color to go with, so we tested a bunch of options. It’s always a good idea to see the paint up on the wall (rather than looking at swatches in a store), so we got to work:

Of course we love color, so we weren’t content to test just a few — we went a little nuts:

Of course we love blues and grays, but we also tried out some crazier colors like emerald green and coral since those are also super popular and for good reason.

It was so hard to choose, but in the end we decided to go with the one we think will create a great neutral base and allow us to layer on many pops of color and personality throughout the house: Chantilly Lace.

In case you can’t see it in the swatches above, it’s this one right here:

It’s hard to see against the white primer, but we swear it is totally distinct, unique, and perfect in every way.

Here’s the part where we admit that we did get a little help from Naomi and Sage, but they kept complaining about how their backs were hurting trying to paint the lower levels of the house. We realized though that if we turned our house on its back, it was much easier for them to paint the downstairs. So this is just a little tip for anyone who is trying to paint at an awkward angle: if you try flipping your house over or laying it down, it might be easier and put a stop to your whining!

The walls and ceilings all needed two coats, and even with this revolutionary “lay the house down” method it still took like two full hours to do the whole thing. Ooph. But in the end, it was SO worth it! The house is looking so much better!

Yes the floors look terrible and we still need to go through with a razor blade to scrape paint off the windows, but we’ve come so far. Here’s a side-by-side to remind you where we started a few months ago: