This is how the walls downstairs will eventually all look - gray, with white trim. (The green at the right will eventually turn gray. That post was kind of a test run to see if we should paint those or not.)

I’m going to be honest with you, at the risk of embarrassing myself:

I spent a couple of days this week thinking that I was going to die from inhaling paint fumes.

I woke up Monday morning with pain swallowing and was having rouble breathing and the fresh air kind of helped but then after I painted again Monday the same thing happened on Tuesday.

And then on social media on Tuesday I saw someone say allergies were bad and I realized, “Oh right, this is what happens every year when the allergies hit.”

So good news, I’m not dying from paint fumes.

Bad news, I have no excuse to not continue painting.

As for the painting itself: I did not think things would move as quickly as they did once I cracked open the primer and got to work painting the first wall of my downstairs painting project.

But as you’re about to see, it was only about 4 or 5 hours of total work over a few days to get the first wall to go from green to gray (with a couple of coats of white to get from one to the other).

Here’s a quick look at the progress:

Here’s what the wall looked like at the beginning - I should have taken a picture before I took down the bulletin board (you can check out yesterday’s post if you’re not sure what I’m talking about), but you can at least get a sense of the green we’re dealing with.

You can get a little sense from the shadows, but not a huge sense, of how bad the lighting is downstairs. It’s fine for most things, but painting is not one of them.

I had to touch up the gray a little because it was very hard to see which areas had been painted over with two coats without shining a flashlight directly on the wall.

The primer was done Sunday night. I used a brush Sunday and for the first coat of gray Monday, and then used a roller for the second gray coat Monday.

On Tuesday I used a brush to fill in the missed spots. Eventually I’ll have to go back over the white spots because some gray spilled. Also, things got messy on the floor.

Here’s a look at some of the stuff we’re dealing with down there - this is just the exercise area. I’ve cleared a lot of this from the area as I paint this section first…and eventually there will be a lot more stuff that will need to be moved around so I can paint the other areas.