What I really needed, I thought, was Before and After photos, so I could see that progress had indeed been made and that I wasn't just pointlessly scrubbing down walls for no reason. By the time I came to this conclusion it was too late to take a Before shot of the project (a downstairs toilet created from the old coal shed with 70s fake-wood panelling, a pink-tiled floor and no sink, ugh), but I'm now halfway through with undercoat on and top coats due to go on any day.
Since this paint job is only a temporary measure – at some point the plan is to move the toilet to another location – I wanted to tart up the yucky toilet walls on the cheap. I’d already ripped out some of the moulding before deciding to retain the wood panelling and just paint it (having already had fairly good results elsewhere doing this), so had to replace it with simple pine quadrant moulding. I also had to No More Nails bits of the panelling down where they had started to come away from the wall. One sheet of panelling was too tricky to repair, so I removed it to find an already-painted brick wall underneath. I filled the worst of the holes in the wall then treated it the same as the panelling.
I skipped primer (luckily the faux-wood panelling was more of an orangey-ish pine colour than mahogany and wasn’t heavily veneered) and went straight for B&Q value white undercoat. And that’s where the project stands today. Already the room feels brighter and – more importantly – cleaner.
