If You Paint It They Will Buy
By Jacqui A Wright

Or, technically 'if you finish painting it they will buy'.

That was the theory which brought about my current situation. Crumpled in a heap of painful determination, or just determined pain, covered in paint and regretting that I had ever heard of sugar soap.

As bright-eyed first-time apartment owners we had enthusiastically launched into painting our new apartment within weeks of buying it.

For the first time in our lives we could alter the colour of our environment so we decided to paint over the existing renter's white with some ground-breaking pale blue-grey (called 'cotton grey' but there is definitely a blue tinge) and with a dark, chocolate brown trim on the skirting boards and doors, inspired by a recent trip to France.

Sadly this enthusiasm was short lived and once we'd used up our annual leave we left the painting half-finished. We tried to get up the energy to finish it but no subsequent weekends or patches of annual leave seemed worth sacrificing to the god of paint.

Fast-forward to four years later and we have decided to sell the apartment in exchange for our sea-change plan. Completing the painting is step one. Followed swiftly by re-carpeting and fixing various broken things.

We decided to stick with the existing colour scheme, partly because we thought it added some character to the place and may distinguish us from the competition and partly because we still had a large amount of paint remaining, hoarded optimistically under the kitchen sink.

I would have just launched into painting the remaining unfinished walls in the blue however an ill-judged but necessary trip to the local hardware store for rollers and brushes raised the spectre of sugar soap. After innocently explaining the purpose of the rollers and brushes, the owner said, 'well you know you'll be needing to wash the walls first, of course'.

Actually I didn't know this of course, and hadn't done more than wipe the dust off for the first painting attempt but I yielded to his superior knowledge and bought a packet of industrial grade sugar soap, promising to wear long rubber gloves while using it. (Although Prince the cat got took a few experimental sips from the bucket before I could stop him and didn't seem the worse for wear but to be on the safe side he is now locked where he can't get to the bucket while I'm working).

At this point I had just been retrenched from work and, while I had a payout that would last me for about half a year, I felt the need to apply the dedication and energy to our renovations that I would for a normal job. What I didn't realise was that working in offices for the past ten years had robbed my body of any muscles previously acquired in hospitality and manual jobs, leaving me with the muscle-tone of an underactive jellyfish with a penchant for daytime TV.

Apparently the odd yoga class and power walk does not prepare one for actual manual labour. By day two I was in real pain. As I swiped sugar soap over the walls in large painful circular motions I consoled myself with the 'wax on, wax off' muscle tone I would be generating as each wall was completed. It was only when I had finished the full sugar soaping circuit that I read the rest of the instructions. You need to wash the sugar soap off afterwards.

It took my sad, office-soft body a full day to sugar soap and then un-sugar soap the whole place. And it's only a one-bedroom apartment.

After completing the blue walls I moved onto the chocolate brown skirting boards and doors. I was about half-way through when my partner came home one night and pointed out that the brown was different to that already painted. It had a certain reddish tint and didn't look so much like chocolate as... something else. In his words it had turned 'poo brown'.

My first thoughts were that the previously painted brown had faded or possibly that the brown in the tins had gone off. Either way it didn't match, it didn't look very fashionable and it didn't look very French. Unless you count that stuff everyone complains about on the pavements in Paris.

Another trip to the paint shop and $80 later we learnt that the paint in the tin should have been re-shaken, preferably by a professional. Unable to match the original French brown we opted for something similarly chocolatey and proceeded to repaint the whole thing.

I've learnt a lot since then about applying dark semi-gloss over white semi-gloss, about the need for very large rollers if you want to avoid streaks on doors and that it's almost impossible to match the off-white paint on the ceiling you just accidentally painted and that it would be very helpful if people could leave the name and details of paint used when they sell a place.

I also learnt some tricks about using painter's tape to achieve straight lines between very contrasting paint colours. A, it doesn't really work and B, you may as well use a cheap masking tape instead of paying $13 for fancy blue tape.

Tap out morals of the day: Paint left in tins, especially dark tinted paint needs a lot of mixing before use. And, as far as sugar soaping is concerned I'm not positive that the ends justified the means. It's possible that the necessity of sugar soaping is just a painting myth created by sadistic hardware store owners. Also, just paint everything the same colour. Seriously. Preferably renter's white.

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