Okay, so one and a half gallons of paint is what it took to complete this project. I painted the three main/common rooms in our upstairs a month ago, but because of my schedule it has taken me this long to get a post up about it. I’m splitting this into two posts, but this one is still super long, but 80% of it will be pictures—I promise.
So as a really quick & brief recap, this is what the living & dining room looked like when Tim bought the house—like these are the real estate listing photos.
And then last winter I decided to paint two of those walls blue…
And then some more time down the road, I decided to paint the fireplace white [the hearth was also painted white even later].
The gutting & reno-ing of the basement had also started somewhere in there and we knew the TV was going to be moving downstairs so that’s when project “Update the Living & Dining Rooms” came to a halt. I didn’t feel like doing much more work on the two areas until the TV got moved because we didn’t have room to store new furniture. Once the basement was done enough to move the TV downstairs, project “Update the Living & Dining Rooms” started back up. I started looking for a new rug, a chair, art prints, pillows, lamps, and more. Well, I found some new pillow covers and slowly acquired art prints I wanted to hang up. I was even given a new lamp for Christmas from my parents and inherited an old storage trunk from my Grandma (which I love, but not Tim). And for several months, the space still felt very “thrown together” and “blah.” I was never satisfied, until it was like a decorating fairy came to me in my sleep.
That’s when I found a chair, a new rug, got my prints framed and decided to paint. I seriously felt like it all just happened at once—which it kind of did, actually. The previous owners had painted almost every room in this house tan, which most people would really appreciate. I hated it and Tim was fine with it [go figure]. I had mentioned painting to him a couple time before, but since he liked the tan I never did. Not to mention, that our living room, dining room and kitchen walls are all sort of “connected” and if you paint one, you have to paint them all. There aren’t really any good “cut-off” points when painting—you’ll see what I mean in the pictures below. Then it was like one day I decided I hated the tan walls so much that I was going to paint them anyway. I did convince Tim in the end to let me paint over it because I said I would paint the stairwell to basement all at the same time so that could be done. So that’s when I went and picked up a few paint samples and slapped them on the walls [which you’ll see in the before pictures]. We picked a color out and that following weekend I got to work. Goodbye tan walls!!
You’ll have to excuse the “before” images—I took them at night since I was going to start taping that evening and start painting that next day. I ended up choosing a blue-gray color from the Olympic One paint line available at Lowes. It’s the paint + primer with low odors. Sometimes it looks light blue, and other times it looks gray. I think that’s why I like it so much. And after much debate, I kept the blue wall. Everyone seems to love that blue wall.
Here I am standing right by our front door. I had a bunch of my birthday cards on the mantel 🙂
Here I’m standing in the doorway from the living room into the kitchen. Check out my sweet trophy sitting on the mantle in the second picture—I won it at my last race. Tim is really proud of it. 🙂
Here’s a look into the dining room from the couch near the fireplace. You can see the dog’s crate there on the right. We keep her confined to the kitchen during the work day, and since there’s a pocket door between the kitchen and living room, we use her crate as the other blockade. The difference between the two follow pictures is one of my favorites.
And the rest of the living room from the fireplace…you can see the paint swatches on the wall.
This is also one of my favorite views of the room. You can now see why I said earlier that if I paint one wall, I basically have to paint all three rooms—the back door is technically part of the kitchen. There is no good place to stop.
Here are the things that still need to be done to this room…
• Install a ceiling fan with overhead lighting
• Two end tables for either side of the couch with table lamps (all of which are on our registry)
• Hang curtains in the living room for our huge window
• Find a round coffee table or ottoman
• Install quarter-round trim along the baseboards.
Even though there’s still a bit to get done, so I’m sooo much happier with the space than I was three months ago. Part II featuring the kitchen is up next 🙂
—m.
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