The second bedroom is demo'd and the electrician will finish up this week. Then Bill and Steve will be in for insulation/drywall and mud/tape, and finally we'll be ready for (totally sexy) French Dan to come refinish the floors. With that milestone in sight I needed to paint the dining room ceiling and crown moulding.
The room has the same big backlit moulding and coved ceiling we saved in the entry. I was so happy with the white trim and pale turquoise ceiling paint we used there that I decided to do the same thing in the dining room. It looked great when it was all done.
Ralph Lauren has discontinued a lot of their ancilary paint products over the years (I always thought their stencils were good), but still available is Candlelight. It's a clear topcoat designed to change the way light hits your walls. If you look at the pictures on the RL website its subtle and pretty. Hoping to enhance the already good looking ceiling this weekend I gave it a try. Here's a review.
The Product: You'll be stirring this for a while, you might want to ask your salesperson to run it through the shaker. Also note this stuff stinks like wet gym socks, and that odor will hang around for a day or so. Don't paint before you have people over for drinks like I did.
Application: Along with the paint you need a couple of specialty RL rollers, one 4 inch and one regular 9 inch. They're very shaggy to mottle the surface. They recommend completing an entire wall (or ceiling in my case) at a time, and also that one person do all the painting. The small roller is used to cut in edges, but only two regular roller lengths at a time. Then two regular strips are rolled on, filling the roller twice for each strip. Finally, X's are made in rows over the freshly painted strips, picking up the roller after each stroke. It sounds worse than it was, then again I'm very comfortable with paint techniques. Either way I think the whole ceiling took me about an hour and a half.
The Result: I'm not in love. I was expecting something subtly magical, what I got seems more reminiscent of semi gloss paint. The increased sheen is also going to emphasize any imperfections in your surface.
The Verdict: We're going to live with it for a bit and see if it grows on us, but I smell a repaint in my future.
