Painting my bedroom

r3dmonk3y

I live in Southern California and planning to paint my bedroom. I have multiple questions. Im planning to redo my bedroom (roughly 15ftx15ft). I currently have orange peel texture on the wall and I currently bought 6 gallons (2x 48lb box) of topping compound.
This is my first time texturing and painting. You know, save some money and learn new things.

1. What texture should I put on the wall before I paint; Vertical brush stroke, flat, or just leave the orange peel?
2. What color best match my cherry wood furniture?
3. Which brand of interior paint is best or good enough?
4. Asuming it's dark color paint, how many coats of paint?
5. Should I primer before texturing and if so, after texturing should i reprimer?
6. How many gallons of paint and primer should I buy?

I am thinking of dark deep red, almost red-brown look.
I am hoping to get as much information as possible. All opinions are welcome. I will post the after picture, once I am done with my bedroom and yes I got a new comferter that is dark red, that I haven't put on yet untill i'm done with the project.I know this is a lot of question, please help me out!

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sunthas

I wouldn't change the texture on your walls unless you hate it or you want to have some fun learning how to texture.

colors are quite subjective, I'd check out some of the design sites, see what colors you like. neutral colors are best if you are selling your house. A fairly typical and simple design strategy is to use a color like green and pick out two shades of the same color painting 3 of the 4 walls the lighter shade and one wall a darker shade. That might be the wall your bed sits against. Normally these shades are found on one strip at the paint store.

2 coats of paint are fairly normal unless you are drastically changing to a dark shade or drastically changing from a dark to a light.

If you do texture you will have to prime, without texture, no need. primer should be tinted to allow fewer paint coats. tint your primer close to your final paint color.

primer is typically applied before texturing.

I'm sure there are paint calculators out there that will tell you what you need for ~480 sq ft minus doors/windows/closets. But I can't imagine you using more than two gallons of paint unless you need more than 2 coats.

if you decided to do a dark red/brown you might try it on one wall first.

r3dmonk3y

Thanks sunthas for the information. I will clean the wall and coat it in primer today. Tomarrow I will apply the texture, but for now I will just coat the wole wall with primer. I am still concidering which color but of course I have to be finish with texturing first. So for right now I'll just focus on doing a good primer job before I start texturing with topping compound.

a) 1 day to clean the wall and primering it with 1 coat
b) 1 day for texturing the wall with topping compound
c) 1 day for reprimering the wall after being textured
d) 1 day for painting the wall in 2 coats

hehe breaking it down to 4 steps in 4 days
hopefully this should make it easyer.
For today I will be doing step A.
I'm putting down the steps just in case someone else is doing the same thing as me. If I did something wrong I will write about it so that other will not do the same.

sunthas

if you go super dark paint, get that primer in step C tinted.

also, I think on the paint can it says you should wait 4 hours before re-coating some paints. normally we just wait til it looks dry, which is often much lower than 4 hours. I assume the idea is to let more water out of the paint in the 4 hours.