by Denise Murphy

Created on: July 02, 2007

One of the best ways I have found to cover wall imperfections without using wallpaper is to use sponge painting instead. I discovered this the hard way when I bought a house that was built in 1930 and two of the rooms still had the old plaster walls. The bedrooms were both in a two bedroom bungalow home and had been painted with what I thought at the time was the most hideous paint job I had ever seen.

A young single mother had lived in the house before I had bought the home and she had painted the larger bedroom which was twelve foot by twelve foot in a lavender with dark brown paint for the trim and woodwork and then had taken a teal color and sponge painted over the lavender walls. The floor was covered with a old and i mean old very worn faded yellow gold shag carpet. The room gave me a migraine just looking at it. The smaller bedroom was tiny with a half bath and it was also a lavender horror but with pink sponged in and the same horrible dark brown wood work and this time the carpet was a worn striped Berber carpet with no underlying pad. It was a nightmare that no amount of beer was going to make livable.

I got to work. I decided to start with the smaller bedroom first and turn it into a home office. I left the rug in while I painted and took great joy in dripping paint on the worn thing. First I did the really hard and time consuming work of stripping the brown paint from the woodwork. It turned out to be enamel paint. I had to use a stripping compound on it to strip it down. Next came the walls. I chose a silver paint with just a hint of blue and then trimmed it out in bright white. It took a lot more paint than I had estimated because of the two toned sponge painted walls. The effect was not exactly what I had expected. The silver walls came out a lot lighter than I had expected and nearly blended into the newly painted white trim and I noticed that imperfections in the walls were suddenly harshly visible where they had not existed before now. The sponge painting had hidden patchwork across one of the walls that until now I had not known was there.

Next came a new light fixture with a small ceiling fan and a new textured blue Berber rug with threads of silver. The room came together nicely after all but it gave me a new respect for sponge painting. It gave me a few new ideas for repainting the main bedroom and it also taught me a valuable lesson regarding color for hiding imperfections in the walls that I will certainly not forget. I decided to go with

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