Side Verandah Makeover: Paint happens! (ORC week 3)

I'm taking part in the One Room Challenge, a design event where 20 featured designers and countless guest participants transform a single space over 6 weeks.  Check out all the other great designs at the One Room Challenge blog.

Catch up with previous weeks of my side verandah plans
Week One     Week Two

Despite keeping a wary eye on the variable weather, I decided to take the chance and get paint down. As it turns out, the forecast chance of rain didn't eventuate, so I'm glad I did. Lots of excitement here!

The change is really visible this week! I couldn't resist seeing what it looked like with plants in place. 

 I realised that I hadn't shown any pictures last week of the extent of the patching I did, only my first two patches.  Here is a close look at one end of the verandah.

My many, many concrete patches. You can see the large hole at the front,
 which I didn't think the Concrete Bog would cope with. 

Painting

When I was looking into painting the concrete, I decided to use White Knight's ULTRA PAVE® QUICK DRY, which seemed to be everything I wanted: water-based, quick drying, tintable, and they also claimed that unless you were painting a driveway or garage floor, it could be its own primer. Excellent. Their website advised doing a base coat of the paint diluted with 20% water, and then one or two top coats at full strength.

Although I had Brunswick Green as my green of choice on the mood board, one of the tintable bases available to just buy off-the-shelf was Forest Green, so I picked up 10L of that for my initial coats. I thought that as the absorbtion and colour reflection would be so different from concrete to woodwork anyway, I'd see how I liked it first. Even if I didn't like the final colour, I could get the next 10L tinted Brunswick Green and still have a fairly close in colour base coat.

I started the base coat with the diluted paint and a brush to cut in the sides and the edges of the different squares, and then went to switch to my roller. I'd bought a special roller that was for concrete/paving because all the paint rollers I had were narrow ones I've used to paint furniture and kitchen cabinet doors. It foolishly did not register that my existing paint tray would be too narrow for the new roller. I struggled to make it work for one section before giving up and painting the rest of the base coat with a brush. Then, as I had to go out on an errand anyway, I added a quick trip to a hardware store for a wider paint tray.

The base coat went on very unevenly - there are three different ages of concrete on the verandah, roughly 'original', from the house renovation five years ago, and my concrete patches.  They all had different absorption rates, and I wasn't happy with it close up. However as soon as I moved out to photograph it  - wow, what a difference!

The base coat of the concrete paint. You can see the different, patchy absorbtion.

Armed with the wider paint tray, I did the next coat with "full strength" paint and it took care of a lot of the patchiness, leaving me with a lovely strong green colour.

Second coat done! Much smoother coverage

I was then facing a dilemma. I underestimated the coverage I would get, and I have enough of the forest green for the third and final coat of paint. So if I get a further 4L of the paint, tinted to Brunswick, for the last coat, it seems like a waste of the remaining paint.  I don't think the forest green is a perfect match to the door - but what if the difference was in the relative glossiness?

In the light and at certain angles, the greens are different - but in shade and at other angles, it looks much closer.

It looks great from certain angles, not as good from others. Once the stencilling is done, and the furniture and plants in place, any colour differences won't be as noticeable anyway, so after a quick poll of some family members and friends, I decided to stick with the budget option and keep using the forest green.  Third and final coat would have gone on today, but I have a sick kid home from school. I'm hopeful that it will happen tomorrow instead.

The other project I was working on this week was beginning to turn the old kitchen cabinet into a potting bench. First steps were to give it a clean and remove all the bits I don't want - doors, cup hook, strange three armed towel holder.

Cabinet progress - one stubborn door remains in place. 

Well, I haven't progressed past that stage yet. There are some very stubborn, very rusted screws which are resistant to WD40 so far.  One upper cabinet door and the towel holder are putting up a strong fight against redundancy.  I have some more strategies to try before I admit defeat yet.

When I was taking the pictures to post, I couldn't resist moving some plants near the door to get a sense of what it looked like with something there - it looks a bit odd just empty - and I'm so incredibly happy with progress so far!  I can't wait to keep going.

This photograph represents a big week of progress for me. 

Last minute update:

Victory!! 

Towel holder and final door - removed!