How not to paint a room

This sucks, really, really, really, really sucks.

The hubs and I were so enthusiastic over the weekend and happy because we painted our first room. Saturday we painted the ceiling white, then waited the until the evening before applying any tape to the ceiling. We taped the room and did all the prep work.

Sunday, while I was out for a long run the hubs began to paint.



This sight instantly warmed my heart after a difficult 17 mile run.

We felt bold! We felt good. I even proudly proclaimed, "goodbye beige lifestyle!" I should have known that triumphant proclamation would come back to haunt me.

The first coat when on and then four hours later we were back upstairs adding the second coat.





The above picture was taken almost at 8pm with only one little lamp in the room. Needless to say, the paint is NOT that dark and there will be more light in the room.

Then, the hubs went out of town for two days. I didn't want to do anything to the room while he was gone so we could see it together when he got back in town.

With the hubs back in town I started to peel off the painters tape used on the trim and ceilings. That's when I noticed that the paint started to peel away from the top of the wall. This is also when I wanted to start to cry!

And curse. I really wanted to drop consecutive, multiple f-bombs in a row, but I didn't.




It's not the end of the world, but it's bugging the daylights out of me. I really don't know what to do. Clearly, the top and bottom sections of the walls are going to peel. Do I just ignore it for now and move on? How the heck do I fix it? Do I have to literally peel the entire two coats of paint off the wall?



We used the same brand of zero voc latex paint on both the ceiling and wall and the walls peeled, but the ceiling didn't. That's what's bugging me the most. The ceiling looks GREAT and the walls, not so much.

Thankfully, we started with our future guest bedroom with the intention that we never use the room. If something went bad, it'd be okay because we don't go in that room. I guess I need to do more research on paint and hopefully we never have this problem again.

However, this completely ruined my happy attitude towards the house. We went bold and ended up flat on our faces. Not fun!

Any suggestions on what we did wrong? Recommendations on how to fix it?

My guess is that our decision to skip a primer came back to bite us. From the limited reading I've done in a pathetic attempt to understand what we did wrong was that we used a latex paint on top of an oil-based paint. An oil-based primer would have worked for us and saved us this mess, but alas we skipped the primer step. We thought with such light walls we didn't need a primer. Looks like we learned a very valuable lesson in home renovations: don't skip steps, even if you think you don't need to do it.

EDITED: Turns out the error was ours and it was simple! We didn't take the tape off before the paint dried! Whoops!