moldy paint?

We moved into this, our first house, about a year and a half ago - June 2010. Thankfully, before we moved in, we were able to do all the updating so we didn't have to live in the mess.

I did a whole ton of painting (it's a large house) and by the time I came to my final project, the upstairs family bathroom, I was so done. Lets just say I did a terrible job. The walls were gray but the details were bad. I taped poorly and I cut in wretchedly and I didn't even clean up the mess where I painted over the tape onto the tile.

Today I remedied it. Check out those edges! (this looking in from the door)

However, I did have quite a trying time getting this project done.

The first thing that needed to be done was tidy up the white edges of the ceiling - they didn't match the rest. So I grabbed the ceiling paint that I used for the dungeon make-over, just 5 months ago, and pried the can open. Instead of the nice white color I was looking for, the top of the paint was kind of a grayish black color. And it looked furry. My first thought was that it was just a little dried out on the top so I tried to scoop it off. But when the stir stick hit the stuff, it just kinda dissolved and was lost. So I stirred it up. It was at this point, when a most wretched smell reached my nose, that I realized that the gray/black top was not dried paint. It was mold. And I had just stirred it up. How does paint get moldy? I have no idea. But it was.

However, I was not to be deterred by the moldy white paint, even though the smell lingered in my bathroom. I had other options. I grabbed another can of white primer from who knows when. But when I cracked it open the paint was definitely dry. No mold so that was good, but still not usable.

Luckily I had a brand new can of ceiling paint that I was able to use after I rolled it around on the floor a while. Perfect.

So after my ceiling was cleaned up, the next step was cleaning up the gray edging. After I cracked open that can (which was only 1.5 years old), I saw that it was on it's way to being dried up. It was all solidified and sticky. Not really stir-able at all! But it had just enough moisture to kinda poke my edging brush into it and get my project done. I did add a little white ceiling paint and it seemed to mix in a little.

Lesson learned - Close paint cans more securely. I don't know what causes paint to mold though...

I also got out a trusty razor blade and cleaned up the mess of dried paint on the tile from my first botched job. Finally, our bathroom is really, actually, completely complete.

And Evie is cute.