Painting over different colours

Hi all,

I've just joined this God-send of a website which I found while looking for advice on renovating my newly purchased apartment. At the moment I am in desperate need of painting advice since I have never really painted.

Currently I am painting a 3 bedroom apartment with an open kitchen, dining and lounge area. The colour of the walls are similar to the colour of the "Confused" emoticon: :?. The colour of the cornices are slightly darker in that shade of blue.

My intention is to do the following:

1. Repaint the ceilings with a single coat of flat white (Taubmans One Coat which has some anti-mould stuff in it) since the ceilings are in pretty good shape and really only want to paint it for the sake of brightening and freshening it up.

2. Repaint the cornices all white from their current blue colour. This is where Im stuck. What type of paint should I use (flat ceiling white to match the ceiling, or a low sheen white to match the walls)? And because the cornices are currently blue, how many coats of paint will be required?

3. Repaint the walls in low sheen. The three bedrooms are going to be a shade of soft milky brown. The rest of the apartment will be a soft yellow. Again, same problem. How many coats of each colour do I need? I went to my local hardware store and the paint expert said to me that I should first use one undercoat of white paint, followed by two coats of the colour that I want. Im thinking jeez thats alot of paint, and alot of work for one person. Another hardware store told me I should do two coats of the new colour I want, where the first coat of that new colour would act as the undercoat, followed by the final coat. And all this time I was thinking that perhaps I would need to only do one undercoat of white, followed by one coat of the new colour. HELP! This is really confusing the life out of me!

Any advice will be greatly appreciated :)

Cheers!


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