Spring is for Painting

It was in the spring of last year that we finally painted our room and our master bathroom!  The rest of the year was busy with all our traveling and having a new baby, and I'm actually more surprised than not that we've gotten any painting done this spring.  I guess it helps that John did most of it.  ;)

John, especially, has been wanting to give the living room a little deeper color, and since it flows into the entry, stairway and upstairs landing, it seemed that we had to paint those, as well.  The walls were also pretty badly marked in places, so it looks much better (though, to be honest, we still haven't filled in all the little dings on the way up the stairs). The straw that broke the camel's back was our new thermostat.  When we replaced our heating system and thermostat last winter, we discovered a square of plum-colored paint hiding behind the old thermostat. The new one didn't cover the dark square, so we had a large paint chip sitting on top of our new thermostat to camoflage it while we waited to paint. (I can't imagine painting such a large room such a dark color!)

    Upstairs hall before

    Upstairs hall after

How do you choose paint colors?  I usually pick out a few marked "historical" in the general colors I'm leaning toward.  We settled pretty quickly on "Homestead Resort Parlor Taupe," but it was a Valspar color, and I asked the people in Lowe's to color-match it to Olympic paint.  I didn't realize painting could be happily low VOC and practically odorless until I tried Olympic!

Well, that is the beginning of a bit of a saga . . . 

One Monday evening while the girlies were in bed and John was at choral society, I decided to surprise him by getting started on the entryway. I tried to use a paint machine we'd been given but hadn't used yet, but I couldn't get it to work and ended up rolling the old-fashioned way.  I was hesitant about how dark the color looked! But it was what we had chosen, right? A day or two later, John got started on some touch-ups and even after they had dried, the touch-ups were lighter than th rest of the walls. Argh! John had gotten the paint machine working and concluded that the apparent mis-tint must have been due to water backing up into the can from the paint machine. He went out to get two new gallons of fresh paint. He even called me from the store to ask what sheen I had chosen (eggshell, by the way). 

Much to our dismay, the new paint didn't match either of the two tones in the walls! And then we realized that John had bought the actual Valspar instead of having it color-matched to Olympic. As it dried, we realized that it was exactly the same color as the paint chip obscuring that plum square over the thermostat, and the man behind the counter at Lowe's had just done a poor job at the color-matching. So, beware of color-matching to a different brand! And we just had to deal with smelly paint. We opened lots of windows and I took the babies out for a while.

The finished product is subtly different, but it looks much cleaner!

     View of Living Room after

Here's the entry before, looking in from the green front door (which I'd love to paint black!). You can see the laundry room straight ahead and the stairs down to the living room on the left. 

Here's the entry after, looking up from the living room stairs. I found that tall mirror in Gemma's closet after stashing it there when we did the nursery and forgetting about it. John hung it a few weeks ago and it's just perfect for the space! It brings in some light to a dark corner and lends some presence to the entry. It kind of reminds me of those mirror/hatstand combinations you see in old Victorian homes.

And guess what! We replaced the boring brass light fixture, too!  Several months ago, Mom asked me if I had a place for a chandelier, and I said "Yes! I have places for about THREE chandeliers!" One man's trash is another man's treasure...this one came out of an apartment she was helping to redo. The previous fixture left a too-large hole in the ceiling, but we found the little medallion at Lowe's which saved us from having to patch it. 

I'd also really love to hang a collage of frames on the walls up and down the stairs, but one thing at a time! It is great fun to see little changes which you've been picturing actually happening!

Have you been painting anything lately?