Painting Your Home-The Tuscan Style Extravaganza

When you decide to redecorate your home, or a major room in Tuscan-Style, you are embarking on an adventure. To really create the authenticity that you see when they whip out this style on the DIY channel, you have to include furniture, lighting, design and staging into your plan to create the perfect Tuscan-Style. For most of us the real fun starts with the painting. Today we’ll start talking about the paint, which will take two blogs so you know it’s not going to be that easy.

I love the look of those walls with the terra cotta faux finish that seem so effortlessly swept across the wall of a Tuscan-Style room. When my daughter and I saw the design team on a DIY’er channel put a beautiful textured faux finish on a wall and the host promised, “It’s so easy, and will look fab-u-lous when it is dry,” we decided this was the look for us. This was some years ago, and I’ve since learned that that phrase is the kiss of death in DIY TV talk.

My thought was that if the entire country of Italy managed to get the Tuscan-Style décor into their homes, it couldn’t be that hard. So I bought a book and dove in. Well, here are some tips for those of you who have read this far and still want to try it by yourselves.

1. Somewhere in your local community there is a marvelous painter, outside or in really doesn’t matter. Painters pride themselves on being masters at their craft and that’s the guy you want to find. This person will walk you through the entire process of mixing the texture, applying it, and be honest with you about how long it will take to dry. Take them a cup of coffee if you see them at a job site and they will chat with you about every detail of your coming adventure.
2. Your texture is available either pre-made, or dry. If you are on a budget and buy it dry, which I did, you will want to get the tool that is made to mix texture. If you don’t, which I didn’t, you are going to need to have several painting outfits because the one you usually use for “all” your painting is going to get ruined before you get the texture wet enough to use.
3. You can buy colored texture, but remember that once it is up, it’s a real pain to paint over and in some cases you will have to peel the texture off and repair your wall to repaint it when you decide to redecorate. If you just keep it the plain, off-white color that it comes in, you can at least paint over it when you decide that maybe bloody-brown isn’t close enough to the color terra cotta to make it work.
4. You texture will be the right consistency when it looks and feels like thick brownie mix. It won’t be runny, but you won’t be able to sculpt with it either. Remember the texture dries very fast if it is somewhere where you don’t want it to be so if you dribble it you will need to wipe it up very quickly. On the other hand, once it is on your wall, depending on it’s proximity to your air conditioning vent, it can take a couple of days to dry so you won’t want to lean on the wall.

In our next blog, The Tuscan-Style Extravaganza – Part II: Painting, we’ll talk about actually applying your texture to get the faux finish that will bring your Tuscan-Style room to life.

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