DIY Update: Painting the Living Room
This will hopefully be just a quick update on the project we tackled last weekend. There’s a bit of story-telling that needs to go with it, so I’m afraid it might not be as short as I’d like.
Here’s the way our living room/kitchen looked about a week ago:
The second picture is the long wall shared by both the living room and the kitchen. The remainder of the walls in the kitchen and living room were an off-white that goes throughout the house.
I know that some people aren’t fans of the red (Behr color: Briquette), but we liked it. Well, we liked SOME of it — having it on both these walls was a little too much red for us.
So we decided to repaint the long living room/kitchen wall to a different color. We were thinking some warm earth tone that would look good with the area rug we purchased around the time we first moved into the house. But we didn’t want to go with too dark of a color since the only natural light in the room comes through the window over the kitchen sink, which looks out to the sun room.
Off we went to Home Depot. Keith picked a color called Oyster for the living room. I picked a color called Desert Camel for our bedroom.
Here’s the Oyster going up:
In this room, with this light, this was not an earth tone — nothing like we were looking for… So then we tried the Desert Camel we had intended for the bedroom:
This picture doesn’t really do it justice — it doesn’t look so bad here. It’s still wet in this picture… But once it dried, Keith swore it had a green tint to it, and I thought it looked like ugly dirty hay. We hated it.
So back to the Depot for a third color we went…. We’ve got a paint guru there and we told him our dilemma, and in all of 2 minutes he had whipped up 4 or 5 options for us. We ended up with Wilmington Tan:
This was much more like what we’d wanted in the first place! And we LOVED how it looked on the walls! It was a natural complement to the Briquette, and looked perfect with the area rug.
In the middle of all this Samoa went into heat:
Can you tell how much she loves that diaper?! ;-)
Well anyway, at this point we loved the Wilmington Tan so much we decided to do the rest of the living room (minus the one Briquette wall that started this whole thing). Here are before & after shots. (pardon the mess – we’re STILL getting settled after a month, trying to find a home for everything)
It really makes the fireplace “pop” now! Before the fireplace kind of melted into the rest of the wall, off to the side like that. Now it actually draws the eye…
After painting I swapped out all the electrical outlets, switches, and faceplates, replacing the nasty old ones with nice white ones. It’s amazing what a coat of paint and new faceplates can do to a room!
PS – the bedroom hasn’t been touched yet. ;-)
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