Another story about the winter home-improvement bug. When the world was feeling particularly crazy and violent, I watched my mind latch onto new ‘problems’ directly under my control and within my power to fix. In an involuntary distraction from war, I was suddenly fixated on every imperfection on my walls and ceilings.
Maybe it was something about the low winter light, or the final stretch of indoor weather that drew my eye towards the bumps and wrinkles. The house had settled years ago, causing the drywall to buckle and a few nails to pop. I don’t have it in me to repaint everything, but everything needs a touch-up. so I started with a crack in the closet, where the paint is flat white, and said to be very easy to blend together with the old coat.
We’ve all heard the caution that you can’t repaint just one spot on a wall finished in eggshell or satin; that the patch won’t match and you have to redo the entire wall. So I thought, first let me see if I can even patch the cracks in a way that holds, and cover on flat paint. Several YouTube videos later, the crack in the closet and the nail-pop on the bathroom ceiling had been cut open, filled, and sanded. I pulled out the old paint buckets from the basement and started stirring, seeing what colors were left so I knew what I could touch up without getting a color match.
In what I consider a stroke of genius, I thought to use makeup blending sponges to apply the paint instead of a standard paintbrush. If I can blend liquid foundation with a sponge, why not water-based wall paint? It worked like a dream in the closet, providing buildable coverage and texture control. But that was flat paint, the easy paint, and the real test would be on an eggshell wall. I moved onto the office because I have to look at a big crack running under my office window every day.
The dogs can also be very hard on the paint. They like to look out the office window from a bench-seat and run their paws against the wall while sleeping and stretching. There were several dog scratches to fill in addition to the big window wrinkle, which needed to be cut open, feathered, and filled several times. When everything was smooth and it was time to paint, I worked in radial patterns to blend the paint from the former cracks and scratches outward into the rest of the field. With very careful blending, I could touch up small blemishes completely seamlessly. For large areas like under the window, taking a plaster-look-approach and moving the sponge in intentionally interesting organic patterns meant that in the few places where I couldn’t get a perfect sheen blend, it looks perhaps like a more expensive and stylish finishing technique.
