The English Maximalista

PLOT TWIST!! Gentle reader, did you really think I was all done in there?!

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As many of you know, I am not a huge fan of beige walls. Which may prompt you ask why I painted the laundry room in that accursed colour in the first place? 

Well, I confess that for a long time, I have secretly been harboring vague, auriferous notions about putting up gold leaf; thus, beige paint would be acting as an undercoat for the project.

In the meantime, I could juuust about survive — on a temporary basis, of course — living with the beige walls.

After much soul-searching and pearl-clutching, I concluded that I could cope, knowing that beige would simply be serving as a provisional placeholder until I eventually got around to gilding.

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Quick recap: here are the two short tours I previously shared with you of the BEFORE and AFTER transformation of our laundry room:

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The gilded Trumpification of the laundry room came to a crashing halt upon my discovery at how much those sheets of gold leaf actually cost… hence the substitution with a MUCH cheaper option: gold-coloured craft paint.

I used FolkArt Metallic Acrylic Craft Paint in Pure Gold, $6.17 for 8 fl oz from Walmart.

At first, I thought I would like the colourwashing effect, which was achieved using only one coat of paint. But in the end, I decided to apply two coats, ultimately using a total of about 40 fl oz (five tubes, aka three visits to Walmart!) of the craft paint linked above.

You may have seen the gold lines I painted on the plywood in our “new” garage. That was my initial experiment to see how good of a substitution the craft paint would be. I was pleasantly surprised… and relieved that the laundry room project might not cost as much as I feared, after all!

Fast forward a few months, to the day when I planned to bedazzle the laundry room. In classic Maximalista style, I ran out of paint, not once, but TWICE. Sheesh.

In my defense, I purposefully purchased paint in smaller quantities this time, a) just in case I didn’t like how it turned out, and b) because I didn’t want to get stuck with a bunch of leftovers that would eventually get chucked-out because it dried up — I hate wasting money like that!

At first, I wasn’t too sure if I liked it but thankfully, after the second coat, I ended up absolutely falling in love with how it turned out.

As did Mr Maximalista, although his initial response was a rueful, “you just cannot leave things alone, can you?”

No, sir, I most certainly cannot!

Lots of love,

M xo