Travels in Fairfaxistan

How do you fill up a mercifully empty Saturday? By attacking the accent wall in the living room. We decided on Sherwin Williams' Cordovan, as the closest match to the Valspar Chocolate Raspberry (Hey Valspar! Get some low-VOC paint!)

Loaded up on supplies, got a test quart, and came home. Pulled the plates off the wall, taped, sanded out the rough patches and filled in the holes, and washed the whole thing down with TSP. Letting that dry now, and will start in with the primer, shortly.

Welcome to Stoupsy's Athens Diner

Well the Sherwin Williams Cordovan was definitely too red. Put up a huge sample patch, and it just wasn't going to work.

Primer

After looking at it for almost two weeks because there wasn't enough time to deal with it, I finally went back to the Eco-Green Living store in D.C. and got them to mix up some SafeCoat paint to match the Valspar Chocolate Raspberry. Slight hiccup in getting the paint, as we went in on Saturday, and were told that they'd contact the manufacturer and get the formula on Tuesday, and call us back. Didn't hear from them by Thursday, so I called back, and it was finally Friday before they said they had the formula and Saturday before I could pick it up.

On Saturday I re-primed the wall where I had painted on the Cordovan, and tackled the first coat of new paint on Sunday. In all likelihood I picked the absolute worst two days to paint, as it poured buckets nearly continuously from 8 AM on Sunday until some time Monday night.