Any colour you like but don't gloss
over the details of home decorating
Painting you a picture of our
experience decorating our house in Italy
Decorating our option room a few weeks back denoted its graduation
from its designated status of 'tool shed' (who has a tool shed with a
floor area of over 100 square metres?) to a very useful heated room of
its own. We decided against 'doing it ourselves' and had a decorating
company in to do the painting for us.
As is normal for us, we always start by working out our own estimate for
the works (partly to see we have the funds and partly to see we don't
get ripped off). We reckoned that around €1200 would be a reasonable
offer so we were not happy when the first price (our main contractor)
came in at about €2000 although he was mysteriously able to reduce it to
€1200 after the first few prices from actual decorating companies
arrived. For various reasons, we decided to go with a specialist
decorating company.
As always with decorating, the first thing to do is to get on with the
difficult job of deciding which colours to choose. In our case, we had
to take into consideration the floor and wall tiles, our huge white
leather divan and multitude of oil and acrylic paintings - all of which
we have found need strong colours to set them off. The decorator gave us
his swatch of colours and left us to it.
Because we live in Italy, one of the main things we needed to decide
upon was what characteristics of paint we wanted - either washable (lavabile)
or non-washable. With a large indoor swimming pool in the room,
condensation is a major consideration so we went for lavabile paint more
or less throughout even though it is several times as expensive as the
non-washable alternative. The ceiling is non-lavabile.
The final paint choice was for a deep pink in the main room with a dark
yellow in the bathroom - a strange choice it may sound but it works well
given the white double glazing, off-white tiles and white floors. The
ceiling was to be white. Our workers, always quick to voice an opinion,
favourable or otherwise, have given the decorating a 'thumbs-up' so far.
Our contractor, perhaps unsurprisingly, has not chosen to comment so
far.
The painter collected the swatch and our colour choices off of us at the
end of the week and arrived to start the decorating first thing on the
Monday morning with two younger workers. They quickly covered and taped
over all the other surfaces and got on with the painting. By the end of
the day they had applied two coats of paint to all the walls and the
ceiling. The most remarkable thing was the speed which they were
obviously managing to work but without appearing to do so. There were a
few splashes of paint but really very little and nothing which cannot be
easily removed.
We settled the bill - €800 (much better than the original €2000) and
agreed to contact the decorator again when we wanted to paint the dining
room and the outside of the house - our next two areas of expenditure.
Their quote for decorating the outside seems reasonable especially
considering our house has a second storey which is not easy to access
from the outside.
That was our last experience of home decorating.
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