This is the hallway before I painted it. The white on the walls is from cleaning the paint roller after I painted the ceiling.
This is the hallway after I painted it. That hallway has not been painted (like much of the house) since 1982, and from 1982 through 2010 there were relatively few days where Mom was not smoking indoors. 28 years' worth of cigarette smoke, and one coat did the trick. We bought two gallons of the buttermilk cream, and I ended up using a bit more than one gallon of paint to do both hallways.
These are two of the air return registers from the hallway. The one on the left has been cleaned with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. The one on the right has not. The one on the right is less dirty than the one on the left was prior to being cleaned.
Magic Erasers and elbow grease saved us $40 on new registers; they look almost brand new, but for some minor scratches. These are the warm air returns, inlets for summertime; I'm hoping to do the same to the cold air returns at the baseboard.
Here's a better view of how well that paint hides:
You can see, much better, how dingy the old paint was compared to the new. In fact, on the right side of the image is one of my roller cleaning spots, and that hid the old cruddy paint even when I wasn't trying to. On the left side, the linen closet doors? You can see the place I used a Magic Eraser on them; that's not a shadow. It's where I scrubbed off cigarette smoke residue.
The camera in my cell phone cannot really reproduce the difference between the ultra white ceiling and the buttermilk cream walls. The difference is slight, but it works very well, and as we intended the buttermilk cream paint is a "warm" white while the ultra white is "cool". As for finish, we went with eggshell on the ceilings and satin on the walls, which also looks really good.
Next up is the family room. Today (Thursday) I'm going to begin to do the paint prep in earnest, including getting after that wall Dad put in; but I'm also thinking of painting the family room in sections, doing one wall per day rather than doing it all in one go. The west wall will be the easiest of the three to do, and I'm eager to get going on it, so I may just paint it once the masking is completed and do the east wall the next day, and the south wall the day after that. We'll see how I proceed, though. My game plan for all these renovations has changed and changed again--but that's fine, because I'm the guy doing all the work, so it's up to me what the order is.
Once the family room is done, I then expect to hit the computer room. That's going to involve moving a lot of stuff around, and probably disassembling my computer desk again, but I can go a day or two without my desktop computer.
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Up at 3:30 AM because "middle aged man", but now I'm tired enough to go back to sleep, I think.