What happens when there is damage to a faux painted wall? Re-finishing the whole wall (or worse yet the entire room!) can be an expensive solution. Instead, I have been called in to do a number of faux painting repair projects where I need to match and blend colors, textures and techniques with the original finish to make a seamless end result.
The first project was a repair to a surface I had originally painted. After the project was complete, the restaurant owner needed to move a thermostat, which left a big square white patch in the middle of a rustic orange faux-painted wall. Since I had done the original painting for this one, matching the color and technique was not difficult – but the challenge didn’t stop there. The orange is a semi-transparent layer over a yellow base, so I had to match the pattern of the surrounding wall without overlapping any of the existing orange, since overlapping would make the area around the patch darker than the rest of the wall – creating a dark “halo” effect around my patched square. To get the patch to blend seamlessly, I had to bring the texture right up to the edge of the patch in a way that didn’t create a seam. The end result is below. The patch is an 8” square immediately below the sconce lighting:
The next project came as a result of water damage from this winter (faux walls were not spared!). This was a large foyer in a home in Dover that features a vaulted ceiling in a circular space. Water had damaged the seams at the corners of the doorways and the sill where the wall met the section of ceiling at the first level. The contractor had patched the cracks – leaving white plaster streaks and patches throughout a large faux-painted space. In this case, I needed to match the colors, technique and texture to blend these areas into the rest of the space so nobody would know that all of this faux painting had ever been damaged! Below are pictures of this finished space, showing a couple of the seams and the sill that were patched and now blend seamlessly:
The final project was a bathroom in Newton that, thanks to more winter damage, needed a new ceiling. Unfortunately, the faux paint job on the walls was not spared from some damage as well. In this case, there were a number of chips out of the top edge of the unique metallic stripes that needed to be patched. In this case, I needed to match the colors, but because the copper striped texture was damaged in such small spots, I replicated this with my fine artists brushes. Here is a shot that used to have roughly 2” semi-circular chips missing from the tops of the copper and metallic green stripes:
Who knew that being an artist would be so helpful in home repairs?!