How I Lost My Mojo...But Made It Work Anyway

I would consider myself a pretty good painter. I've painted quite a few walls and developed techniques along the way. I've painted walls every color from primer white to glossy black. I'm not afraid of color in the least and in fact embrace it.
When we first bought the house, the downstairs bathroom was a lovely shade of poop brown. According to my rule book, two colors should never be painted in bathrooms - brown and yellow. I don't think I need to explain why, those are just my rules. Anyway, I had been wanting to get rid of that gross brown for quite a while but the right color never seemed to jump out at me, no matter how many paint swatches I stared at. Finally, after multiple paint samples for the dining room I found our color. Fuchsia!

As soon as the color was selected I knew where I wanted to take the rest of the room. Ideally I would be going all out glam and glitz, but that's not realistic since I live with a man. Not exactly fair. Anyway I decided that I wanted to keep everything black and white except for the crazy colored walls, that way nothing would be too overwhelming. We'll get back to all this good stuff, but we've got to get past the bad first.
Since the brown on the walls was such a dark color I knew it needed to be primed. When we were picking up paint for the dining room we also grabbed a can of primer. I have heard that this primer is an excellent quality primer so I was confident it would work just fine.
I put on two coats (this picture only shows one) and everything looked nice. I began painting the fuchsia and that is where my problems began. Despite putting on two solid coats of primer, patches of ugly brown were beginning to peek through in various spots. Some were worse than others.

This was not pretty and I was a bit upset. I continued on in hopes that a couple more coats would fix everything. It usually does, but not this time. Things were starting to look worse. It basically looked like a murder scene as Glenn so kindly pointed out when I hesitantly showed him my progress. I decided I needed to start over.
This time I was going to use a primer I had used a million times before and was comfortable using. We picked up a gallon at Lowe's and I got to work yet again. This time my primer practically refused to stick to the walls. It was like I had painted latex over oil based, which was certainly not the case. Now I was more than a bit upset. It left these hideous patchy spots all over with a really bizarre texture. Some spots even had gruesome looking drips when I came back to look at it 15 minutes later.

I lost it. I was at my wit's end and I broke down in tears. I didn't know what to do and I was literally sobbing on the bathroom floor like a child. It's embarrassing to admit that, but not only is it true, I feel like it is an important aspect to my story. I angrily stabbed out words on my computer begging for some sort of consolation from Glenn while he was at work. Unfortunately for me he was busy and was not about to deal with me being ridiculous. In fact, he thought it was funny. At this point I was fuming. In retrospect, this may be about the most absurd display of behavior I have ever exhibited.
After calming down and hours of Googling possible solutions I decided I would try oil-based primer. It supposedly works wonders and stinks to the high heavens. I had nothing to lose and what did it matter if I added yet another useless can of primer to my ever growing collection. As soon as I set the primer soaked roller to the wall my worries started to melt away. It covered like a dream and aside from the textural mistakes, the wall looked clean and new again. Two coats later and my bathroom was ready for it's lipstick.

Six or seven coats of pink paint in I learned a valuable lesson. Tinted primer is ALWAYS a good idea. I could get into the science of how the pigments work to reflect light and why you need a base of a certain color to get the truest final result, but I'm not going to. If you are doing a bold color, just be safe and get a gray tinted primer. I was quickly running out of paint and I realized that more layers of color were just not going to even out some of the lighter areas in the bathroom. I decided to just accept the bathroom for what it was and enjoy the fact that I have a pink room in my house and that I have a pretty incredible husband who is basically a saint for dealing with me through this awful month long process.
To tie everything together I began adding the details. I wanted a semi-masculine shower curtain to balance all the girly. I went with horizontal racing stripes.
To keep things a little bit glam I replaced the old shower curtain and rings with shiny chrome. At some point all the rest of the metals in the room will also be chrome.
I finally got to buy the rug I have been wanting for ages now. The fun zig zag pattern adds a bit of chaos and graphic pop.
We added a simple black framed mirror in place of the mirrored medicine cabinet.
To make up for the storage I removed we added an interesting chrome and glass shelf unit. The stuff sitting on it is not permanent. I'll be accessorizing more appropriately at a later time. I also bought some hanging ceramic pots to keep bathroom essentials in like Q-Tips and cotton balls.

That my friends, is how I lost my mojo. It certainly wasn't pretty and I certainly didn't enjoy it. There was a lesson to be learned and I have since taken it to heart. I didn't hesitate for one second in buying tinted primer for the dining room. I also learned that despite all of my frustration, I still love the color pink and I love my pink bathroom more and more every day.