What happens when three best friends find a fabulous pad and decide to move in together?  Three best friends, may I add, with very different tastes in decorating, very strong opinions, and construction and renovation skills that are mediocre at best.  Hilarity, heartbreak, and home improvement mayhem are sure to ensue.

The first thing you do, when you move into a new space, is paint.  It’s far easier to get painting done when there is no furniture in the way, and if you’re decorating, you want to decorate around your chosen wall color, not the other way around.  So the first thing we three ladies, lets call us Miss Eclectic (that’s me), Miss Mod and Miss Contemporary, did when we got the keys to our swinging new bachelorette pad was go down to Home Depot and pick up paint swatches.

Paint swatches are, apparently, a great indicator of decorating personality. When Miss Mod and I went to the paint store, she walked away with a double handful of different variations of pale gray-blue.  I, on the other hand, had a palate that looked like a slightly seventies era psychedelic rainbow, at least two shades of which I had no intention of painting anything with, be it walls or furniture.  And Miss C?  Miss C had exactly two paint swatches in exactly the two colors she intended to paint her room.

After Misses M and C finished mocking me for the words, “don’t you think the white tile in the bathroom would look cool with kelly green paint” we got down to the business of picking one of the many, many, many shades of blue we had to choose from for Miss M’s walls.

Miss M and I settled on our shades, and Miss C confirmed her choices, and then we went back to the store for paint, rollers, brushes, and my new favorite toy – an edger.  Edgers are square, flat brushes that you run down trim to create, yes, you guessed it, a straight edge of paint.  They work like a charm, I HIGHLY recommend them.

I also highly recommend buying more paint than you think you need.  When the man behind the paint counter says the words “well, that will probably be enough, but you might have to come back for more,” just buy more.  You can always keep it on hand to touch up the wall later and by the time you’ve gotten a whole gallon of paint on your walls you will be FAR too tired to make second paint store runs.

But we three Misses chose to optimistically believe that “probably” meant we had enough paint.  Which left us running low by the time we had the first, obviously too thin coat of paint on the walls.

So what do you do when you’ve got too little paint left in the bucket to even get it into a roller pan, and a room full of splotchy thin patches of paint and not enough time or energy to run back to the paint store and get more supplies?  Like any other home improvement emergency, this is the time to improvise.  I took a small brush (to get to that last inch of paint that’s almost impossible to get out of a paint can), a step ladder, and an audiobook (to prevent boredom inspired sloppiness) and went to work.  After and hour of painstaking hand application of an extra coat to the thin spots, Miss M and I had officially put every single drop of available paint on the wall.  It was time to wait and see what the dry paint would look like.

Luckily, our emergency efforts produced good results.  I don’t, however, recommend making a gallon of paint stretch to cover a 13 by 10 room.  Buy more paint than you need, and buy all of the various tools you think you’re going to need to get a room painted properly BEFORE you start painting.  There is nothing that will prevent a room from feeling put together more than a poorly applied paint job!