Now, one of the first things they teach you in Media Room Crafting 101 is that your media room should be dark, REALLY dark. The goal is to keep light from reflecting off of any other surface in the room other than the screen, to avoid washing it out. A media room has a singular goal, and that's to focus people on the media. In this case, it will be on a big screen, which we want people to be able to see. So... we're painting the room dark. And the color, as mentioned earlier, was inspired by a rug that I already had.
So let's get started. First, the dining room had molding, on the floor, the ceiling and a middle section right on the screen wall. So we had to tape everything up with the blue painters tape you get at Home Depot. Following are a few fascinating pics of just that...
Here's the tape covering the molding that is right in the middle of the wall where the screen will be.
The crown molding.
The dimmer switch installed previously.
And the dog, who's wondering what I'm up to... and why he's not allowed within a 10ft radius of the room.
The paint is Valspar, from Lowe's. It's a flat paint, which means it's a low gloss, although technically it's not zero gloss. I learned recently that paints have a gloss value from 0 to 100, and that 'flat' isn't 0, it's actually something like 5 on the glossy scale. You can get paint with 0 gloss at Sherwin-Williams or something, but I wasn't too worried about it, so I just bought regular flat paint from Lowe's.
The exact color I can look up later if anyone really wants it, but it's basically a deep burgundy color. You can get a good look at it here, as well where some of it chipped off when removing the tape:
Here's a sideways pic of the mid wall in-progress during the painting. You can see that after only one coat of this stuff, it looks really streaky and splotchy. You almost HAVE to put two or three coats to get it to look right. And that's pretty much what we ended up doing.
Here's the top corner, where I needed a stool and a tiny paintbrush to really get in there and finish it off. By the way, my mom helped me do a lot of the painting, but she did it for free so I don't have to include it as an expenditure. :)
The dimmer switch, post-painting. Again, the paint chipped off when removing the tape, requiring a lot of touch up. The lesson with this stuff is don't leave the tape on too long.
Here's the plastic drop sheet and the step stool we used to reach the high parts.
And finally, after a few coats, and two gallons of paint, the room is done... or at least it looks good enough to call it done for now.
Here's the main wall, as seen from the foyer:
And again from in the middle of the room. Notice all the light that gets to that wall from the window to the right and the foyer area on the left.... but we'll deal with that later.
The other end of the room.
And a couple pics of the side, with everything back where it was and hung up.
And one more pic of the screen wall. You can see the track lights at the top, and the Rock Back drums at the bottom right.
And the dog... still wondering what's going on, and why he can't drink the paint.
So, what's the current tally? Well, two gallons of paint, at $30 each, plus approximately $25 in supplies (roller, drop sheets, bin, brush, tape, etc.), brings us to $85 for the painting, plus the $50 for the lights, so a total of $135 so far.
Not bad.
Up next? The screen.
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