How to cover scarlet feature wall without wallpaper

[JustineCase]

Am in the process of buying a house and the living room has a bright red feature wall, which is not my taste.

Not being a fan of wallpaper and preferring plain, painted neutral walls how do you suggest I change it?

Paint it not scarlet?

Paint it?

Well, the obvious answer is by painting it. Might take a few coats but will give you a plain, painted neutral wall.

Or you could use lining paper then paint it but that looks a bit crap. Or have it reskimmed?

Dulux one-coat /Dulux Once is brilliant! Covers in one coat!

Yes I did think of painting it, but it is fire engine red so would take more than a few coats. I will check out the dulux. Thanks!

We had alternating ketchup red and mustard yellow walls when we moved in. We tried the one coat stuff and it took three (expensive) coats to cover the red properly.

I would suggest that you buy basecoat and use that to even out the colour over all the walls (if you are painting the whole room) before using for the more expensive top coat. Even if you aren't painting the rest of the room, using basecoat to cover the red first is cheaper than two or more coats of the final colour.

Paint it with a few coats of white first then paint over with your preferred colour. Red is a nightmare but it will cover up eventually. Starting with white means you can but a cheaper paint first to cover it up.

Polyfilla wall filling paint covered a dark purple square in our first house (did the whole wall though!) followed by the usual two coats of normal paint.

I'm sure a good paint shop (if that exists!) would tell you have to do it. Or, seeing that it's only one wall, get a professional painter and decorator to do it.

My MIL once painted her ENTIRE living room in a very vibrant, slightly orange tinted red. It lasted 3 days, then she got a decorator in to wall paper it.

You can buy primer emulsion which is really thick and comes in white. Its a bit of a chore applying it even with a roller but made a decent job of a deep red wall I had. I bought the Homebase version.

We had a fire engine red wall in a previous house and we painted it pink first before painting it white on the advice of a decorator friend. It meant that we didn't need 500 coats to cover it.

If you sand it gently and use quality paint, it'll be covered in 3 coats probably. Just don't buy some cheappo B&Q paint or similar as 10 coats might not do...

Paint over it in mid grey, this will block the colour and you can then repaint any shade.

It works, we recovered a navy blue (!) hallway (dh's choice before I moved in )and then after grey undercoat painted in white.

No particular brand,just get a decent white paint and blend it down to a mid grey with someblack

Agree with pp,paint it with mid grey or yellow. It covers better than white. Do a couple of coats and then a couple of coats of the colour you do want. We did it this way last year when covering up our bright red chimney breast.

Y thick undercoat of grey should block the red

Agree about the grey. That is what our decorator did when we moved into a technicolor house.

Cool!! I'll do the grey trick then. Thanks a lot