When paint touchups morph into entire rooms

Thankfully paint isn’t a major budget buster!  

The repaired wall my husband had been working on has received a fresh paint job.  In an attempt to do good, he also touched up a few other walls that had scuff marks.  While his intentions were good, sadly the paint color is a shade off.  We will now be repainting our entire main living area.  More time and money spent but as I prefer to look at it, could be far worse.

The interior of our home had seen fresh paint before we moved in not quite two years ago.    Unfortunately, the paint can found in the basement was rock hard.  Benjamin Moore, we learned, had also discontinued the formula used in the old can.  While we thought the match looked okay, once on the wall, it didn’t.  Who would have thought an off-white could vary so much?  We have a cathedral ceiling and a house with a lot of windows letting in a whole lot of light.  The variance shows and not in a favorable way.

Next time my hubby is home, we will buy more paint.  I don’t like cheap paint, as you get what you pay for.  I am sure, however, that we can get good quality paint for less than the cost of Benjamin Moore.  The quart that we bought was $19 and some change.  I don’t want to know what two gallons might cost.  Seeing it on the wall, it looks to have an orange undertone which I do not like at all, hence wanting to go with something else.  We’ve used Behr in the past with good results so that may be a good option.

I wish we could get away with only repainting the one wall but with the touch ups, we now have more work.  Our house is also very open, so it would be difficult to get away with this anyway.  In my opinion, that is one disadvantage to an open floor plan.

Sometimes I think that once we have our debts paid off, we will hire someone to do this type of work for us.  Then reality sets in and I start thinking about the money we are saving by doing this ourselves.  I’m pretty sure that as long as we are physically capable of doing the work, we will continue doing it ourselves.  While we won’t be paying off debt, we will then be saving for retirement.  Hence, we will still need to watch our dimes.

In other news, hubby and I did have our budget meeting.  Ironically, the need for a household maintenance line item was a big part of what we discussed.  We will incorporate this into June’s budget.  Good thing, as that is when we plan on repainting!