Decorating our alternative room a couple of weeks back denoted its graduation from its designated status of \'tool shed\' (who has a tool shed with a floor area of over 100 square metres?) to a incredibly helpful heated room of its own. We decided against \'doing it ourselves\' and had a decorating business in to do the painting for us.
As is regular for us, we always begin by working out our own estimate for the works (partly to see we have the funds and partly to see we don\'t get ripped off). We reckoned that around EUR1200 would be a reasonable supply so we had been not happy when the 1st price (our main contractor) came in at about EUR2000 even though he was mysteriously able to reduce it to EUR1200 following the first few prices from actual decorating companies arrived. For various factors, we decided to go with a specialist decorating business.
As constantly with decorating, the first factor to do is to get on with the tricky job of deciding which colours to decide on. In our case, we had to take into consideration the floor and wall tiles, our enormous white leather divan and multitude of oil and acrylic paintings - all of which we have found will need strong colours to set them off. The decorator gave us his swatch of colours and left us to it.
Given that we live in Italy, one of the main things we required to decide upon was what characteristics of paint we wanted - either washable (lavabile) or non-washable. With a significant indoor swimming pool in the room, condensation is a significant consideration so we went for lavabile paint much more or much less throughout even although it is a number of times as expensive as the non-washable option. The ceiling is non-lavabile.
The final paint selection was for a deep pink in the main room with a dark yellow in the bathroom - a strange option it may possibly sound but it works well given the white double glazing, off-white tiles and white floors. The ceiling was to be white. Our workers, normally fast to voice an opinion, favourable or otherwise, have given the decorating a \'thumbs-up\' so far. Our contractor, perhaps unsurprisingly, has not chosen to comment so far.
The painter collected the swatch and our colour selections off of us at the end of the week and arrived to commence the decorating very first thing on the Monday morning with two younger workers. They promptly covered and taped over all the other surfaces and got on with the painting. By the end of the day they had applied two coats of paint to all the walls and the ceiling. The most remarkable thing was the speed which they had been obviously managing to work but without having appearing to do so. There had been a few splashes of paint but really rather little and nothing which cannot be very easily removed.
We settled the bill - EUR800 (significantly better than the original EUR2000) and agreed to contact the decorator once more when we wanted to paint the dining room and the outside of the house - our next two areas of expenditure. Their quote for decorating the outside appears reasonable specifically contemplating our home has a second story which is not effortless to access from the outside.
That was our last encounter of household decorating.
