Hi everyone! As I mentioned in the latest Recent Recap, we decided that the first week after our move in to get as many major projects done as we could and then move in our things. I'll just set the stage by saying that by the time we moved in, we had been living out of boxes and eating takeout / snack foods for 2+ weeks plus we'd also been traveling, I'd been taking a class, and we were generally worn out. Add to that a full day of moving on Saturday and the stress of closing and we were pretty cooked when we woke up on Sunday. I had made up my mind that come Sunday morning, we were starting our work and we did. We started with the "dining room"--we taped, we shopped, we painted the walls, and we painted the trim. It was our first room and it took us a long time to get in the rhythm of painting and working together. Plus, see previous details, tired. This is what the "dining room" looked like before. . . It wasn't a bad room at all before but it was kind of "blah" to us-- we wanted an impact. Here's the color and new trim. We really like the bold color and I think it looks great with the white trim. I'm hoping to convince David that we need to make a gallery wall here. This room is far from being a true "after"-- we still need to hang pictures and, as I said, would love to make it a dining room so we also need a table that fits the room. For now, though, I'm working on this book case situation which will be a place for our cookbooks ( since it's right next to the kitchen! ) and a drink station with coffee and tea and of course some cute mugs. Once we finished this room, we moved on to the living room. For some reason, this was the only room in the house with a popcorn ceiling. David was having none of that so he watched a ton of videos on how to get rid of it and we went to work. Basically, you have to wet the "popcorn" so it detaches from the ceiling and then scrape it off. The first step was covering all of our surfaces, lights, speakers, etc. You can see the difference in the texture of the ceiling in the picture below. This was one project that really made me appreciate doing it while most of our things were in the basement. That ceiling got everywhere, especially after we got the popcorn off and then had to sand the ceiling to make sure it was an even surface. Then of course we had to paint it. Thankfully I did probably 10-20% of this project and David did the rest. Thank goodness for that because it was HARD physically. It was easy to do and understand but that much time with your arms above your head is exhausting. Finally, we taped the room and were ready for paint. This is the part where I tell you the naive, first time homeowner story. Are you ready? I had no idea what I wanted for paint. We tried a sample. We hated it. At this point though the idea of getting more samples (and spending more money) on paint sounded terrible so I spent way too long at the paint store trying to pick between these tiny samples and finally picked a color. I figured, we loved Smoky Blue ( which we didn't even get sample of! ) and we loved our trim color so we could do this. We had tried Krypton (bottom left) and it was too blue so I figured that Reflection would be better. It looks less blue, right? Here's the part where you cringe or possibly even put your head in your hands: We painted the whole room Reflection. I bought two gallons of paint. I hated it. It looked like it was supposed to be a baby boy's room. I cried; I'm not too proud to admit that. We painted that room that terrible color at 11 o'clock at night by the dim light of bedside table lamps because the lighting in that room is downright awful. We thought, it will get better. We'll paint the room and then it will look better. It didn't. I woke up that next morning, shook my head at it, worked out, and then researched paint colors online. I figured that I had picked Smoky Blue based on seeing another blogger's post on it in her dining room so maybe the internet could come through for me again. It was better than the stupid paint swatches. We ended up with Moonshine from Benjamin Moore. First, we primed the whole room ( so, we painted it a SECOND time ). Then, after that took 12 hours to dry, we painted the whole thing Moonshine ( yes, we got a sample and tested it first this time ). Can I tell you something? It still looked blue to me. All of the pictures online of this color online are like this. . . You see that it's gray too, right? It's not just me? Anyway, our living room is an odd shape and situation so parts of it are very well lit and parts of it have almost no natural light. When you look at the room, it almost looks like we painted the walls different colors. Uhm, we didn't. Sometimes it's got a green tint, often a blue tint, and rarely a gray tint. Ultimately I think it goes better with our brown furniture than a straight gray would have but it's also not the color I was expecting. Apparently lighting really is everything with paint. Here's a shot of the color on our walls. . . Here's the before around the fire place from the previous owner's Zillow post. . . Here's our after version . . . I think the fireplace does pop a bit more in our version, which is good because we re-painted that whole thing when we did the trim. The rest of the living room will have to be another post because we're still waiting on a TV Stand ( which was a very irritating experience with Target.com that I'm hoping ends well. . . ) and we need to find a rug and some dining chairs. Hopefully we'll get that all together soon! We also painted all of the kitchen cabinets to brighten the kitchen but that will have to be another post as well because we're still waiting for our new dishwasher. We had un-installed the old dishwasher a few days ago but the valve that shuts off the water to the dishwasher is so old that it wouldn't close all the way. The only way we could keep that water from streaming all over our kitchen floor was to hook the hose back up to the old dishwasher. So it's not ready for the after pictures yet. Here's the photo I took back in May of the kitchen before. You'll just have to check back soon to see what we've done with it!
1 Comment
Patty
8/17/2016 09:51:38 pm
You two have first time home owner energy, awesome!!!
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