DIY Disaster: How Our Weekend Paint Project Turned Into a Month-Long Saga
Posted by Natasha Red on March 18, 2025
There’s something about spring that makes perfectly rational people believe they’re capable of incredible feats of home improvement. The sun comes out, home decor shows start auto-playing on Netflix, and suddenly you’re convinced that you—a person who once super-glued your fingers together trying to fix a coffee mug—can completely transform your living space with nothing but a few YouTube tutorials and blind optimism.
This, friends, is the story of how our “simple weekend project” to repaint our living room turned into a month-long saga that tested our marriage, our sanity, and our children’s vocabulary of curse words.
The Innocent Beginning
It started innocently enough. The living room walls, once a crisp “Dove White,” had evolved over seven years with three children into what I can only describe as “Evidence of Crime Scene.” Crayon masterpieces, mysterious sticky handprints, and the time Jake tested if markers really were washable (narrator: they were not) had left our walls looking like an abstract expressionist had a seizure.
“We should repaint,” I said casually one evening, scrolling through Pinterest while Mark watched basketball. “It can’t be that hard. People do it all the time.”
Mark, without looking away from the game, muttered, “Sure, sounds good.”
And just like that, with the casual agreement of two people who had absolutely no idea what they were agreeing to, Project Paint Nightmare was born.
The Color Wars
Our first mistake was involving the children in the color selection process. I envisioned a calm family discussion resulting in a sophisticated neutral that would complement our furniture and hide future grime.
What actually happened was a three-day war of attrition.
Emma advocated passionately for a shade called “Midnight Plum” that was essentially black with the faintest hint of purple—perfect for her future as a Victorian ghost, apparently.
Jake wanted “Superhero Blue,” which looked like someone had liquified a Smurf.
Lily, not to be outdone, insisted on “Princess Pink,” a color so aggressively bubble-gum that it gave me a migraine just looking at the swatch.
Mark and I wanted something in the beige/gray family, which the kids unanimously declared “boring” with the kind of disdain usually reserved for broccoli and early bedtimes.
After multiple sample pots, several tears (mostly mine), and one paint swatch that mysteriously ended up stuck to the cat, we compromised on “Coastal Fog”—a soothing blue-gray that wouldn’t show dirt and wouldn’t make our living room look like either a nightmare dungeon or the inside of a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.
The Supply Run That Broke The Bank
This brings me to our second mistake: underestimating everything about this project.
“We just need paint and brushes, right?” Mark said as we headed to the home improvement store on a Saturday morning.
Three hours and $427 later, we staggered out with:
- Two gallons of premium paint (because apparently, cheap paint is just colored water)
- Primer (a concept neither of us had considered)
- An assortment of brushes and rollers that the sales associate insisted were “essential”
- Drop cloths to protect our floors
- Painter’s tape (“Blue tape is your best friend,” the associate assured us)
- A contraption to attach rollers to poles
- Multiple trays and liners
- Something called “cutting in tools” that I still don’t fully understand
- Sandpaper, spackle, and patching tools for wall preparation
- A variety of overpriced beverages and snacks because shopping for paint supplies is apparently exhausting
As we loaded our haul into the minivan, Mark whispered, “We could have gone on a weekend getaway for this amount.”
If only we had.
The Words of Wisdom We Should Have Heeded
Before starting, I’d actually done some research and came across an interview with Kevin Brackens, owner of Brackens Painting. His words should have been our warning:
“The biggest mistake homeowners make is thinking painting is just about slapping color on a wall. Proper preparation takes 70% of the time in a quality paint job. Skip the prep, and you’ll be looking at bubbling, peeling, and uneven coverage within months. When homeowners tell me they can paint their living room in a weekend, I know they don’t understand what they’re getting into.”
Reader, we did not understand what we were getting into.
Did we heed Kevin’s wisdom about preparation? Did we carefully patch holes, sand rough spots, clean walls, and apply primer diligently?
We did not.
“It’ll be fine,” Mark said, slapping a piece of blue tape haphazardly along the ceiling edge. “The paint has primer in it already.”
Day One: Optimism Dies Quickly
Saturday morning began with boundless enthusiasm. We moved furniture, laid drop cloths, and assigned jobs. Even the kids were excited, dressed in their oldest clothes ready to help.
By noon, our enthusiasm had evaporated faster than cheap paint thinner.
We discovered that:
- Our walls had more imperfections than we’d noticed in seven years of living here
- Painter’s tape does not, in fact, create perfectly straight lines when applied by amateurs
- “Cutting in” around edges is an art form, not an intuitive skill
- Children’s help with painting is actually the opposite of help
- Premium paint can still drip and splatter with impressive reach
After Emma accidentally painted a streak across our ceiling, Jake stepped in a paint tray, and Lily used a roller to create what she called a “fog rainbow” across our sofa (which was supposedly protected by drop cloths), we banished the children to the backyard under Mark’s supervision while I tried to salvage what was quickly becoming a disaster.
The Family Meltdown
By 7 PM on Saturday, we had completed exactly one and a half walls. My back felt like I’d been medieval tortured. Mark had paint in his ear somehow. The kids were filthy, hungry, and cranky. And our living room looked worse than when we started.
“Maybe we should call a professional,” I suggested, stretching my cramping hand.
“After spending $427 on supplies? No way,” Mark replied, his pride clearly at stake. “We can do this.”
This is the moment our weekend project officially extended beyond a weekend.
We ordered pizza, put the kids to bed, and spent another three hours painting until midnight, when exhaustion and a near-divorce experience over the proper rolling technique forced us to call it a night.
The Extended Timeline
What happened next was a blur of weeknight painting sessions, additional supply runs (how does one run out of EVERYTHING?), and increasingly creative excuses to visitors about why our living room looked like a war zone.
“We’re going for an industrial, deconstructed look,” I told my mother-in-law when she stopped by unexpectedly in week two.
By day 14, we’d finally finished the actual painting, only to remove the painter’s tape and discover horror show edges that required touch-ups with a detail brush. I spent three evenings hunched like a gargoyle, painting one-centimeter sections while questioning all my life choices.
The Professional Assessment
Finally, after nearly a month, our living room was painted. It looked… okay. Not professional. Not terrible. Just okay. The color was nice, but up close, you could see every amateur mistake.
When my friend Lisa stopped by, she brought her neighbor Kevin—who turned out to be THE Kevin Brackens of Brackens Painting that I’d read about. I wanted to hide under the newly painted “Coastal Fog” walls.
Kevin was kind enough not to laugh openly at our work, but he did share some wisdom that I’m passing on to save you from our fate:
“DIY painting isn’t about saving money—it’s about the satisfaction of doing it yourself. But if you’re going to do it yourself, do it right. Take the time to prepare properly. Be patient with the process. And understand that what professionals do in a day takes amateurs a week because we’ve made all the mistakes already so you don’t have to.”
He glanced at our ceiling, where faint blue smudges were still visible despite my touch-up attempts, and added, “And always, always use ceiling paint on ceilings. It’s formulated differently for a reason.”
Lessons Learned
Now that our “weekend” project is finally complete and we’ve reopened our living room to the children (with extensive threats about what will happen if anyone so much as looks at the walls with dirty hands), here’s what we learned:
- There’s a reason professionals exist. Some skills take years to perfect, and painting is definitely one of them.
- Preparation really is 70% of the job. Kevin Brackens wasn’t exaggerating. The spots where we rushed prep work are painfully obvious now.
- The “DIY discount” is a myth. By the time we factored in all the supplies, the pizza dinners because I was too exhausted to cook, the therapist I’ll need to process this trauma, and the value of our time, we could have hired professionals and possibly gone on that weekend getaway too.
- Marriage counseling is cheaper than divorce. There were moments during this project when Mark and I communicated solely through grunts and sighs, having exhausted our ability to disagree constructively about roller technique.
- Children and paint are a combination invented by Satan. I’m still finding blue-gray fingerprints in places that defy explanation.
But there was one unexpected benefit to this disaster: While scrubbing paint out of Lily’s hair one night (don’t ask), she looked up at me and said, “Mommy, even though painting is hard and daddy said lots of words I’m not allowed to say, I like that we did it together.”
And that, friends, is how I justify the entire fiasco to myself. We didn’t just paint a living room. We created a memory—a traumatic one, perhaps, but a shared family experience nonetheless.
Will we DIY again? Ask me after therapy. But for now, I’ve hidden all the home improvement shows in our Netflix profile and flinch when anyone mentions the word “project.”
As Kevin Brackens wisely told us while diplomatically examining our handiwork, “The best tool in a homeowner’s arsenal is often their phone—to call someone who does this every day.”
Amen, Kevin. Amen.
Have you survived a DIY disaster? Share your home improvement horror stories in the comments. Misery loves company, especially when it’s covered in paint!
