Green with Envy

My initial goal to get the painting done by Friday night was nothing but a pipe dream. I didn't even start priming the woodwork until Friday night after work. While I did that Tom finished off the laminate floor in the entryway by putting the quarter-round down. After all of that was done we WOULD have cracked open a gallon of our chosen paint ("Dill" from Pittsburgh Paints) if we had ... you know ... purchased it.

Then I was all like "I'm going to get up early and I'll be waiting at Menards when they open the door!" because I was DYING to paint. I was going to paint me some walls! But we all know how 8am turns into 9am, and then before you know it ... it's noon. Right? Happens to all of us. Then Tom just wound up going by himself so I could get the lawn mowed (of course!) before the weather turned on me.

(Note: For my birthday, I bought myself a new lawnmower. It's not the "Cadillac of lawnmowers" like the guy at Sears kept showing us over and over again. The one I bought is more like the "Chevy of Lawnmowers" but it doesn't have a broken wheel (woo!), it doesn't need to be primed (score!) and it has big ol' wheels on the back for maneuverability.)

(And it's cute.)

Back to the topic at hand. I won't make you go back searching for the before shots of our living room. Here it is before we moved in, when we did a walk-thru with the home inspector:



Then we moved in and we ripped up all the carpet, put down laminate in the entry and had new carpet installed. The living room now looked like this:



Getting better, EH?! These pictures don't really capture the fugliness of the paint color, though. The funny thing was, almost everyone who has been in our house so far has liked the paint. That kept throwing us for a loop. It's sort of a purple, sort of a beige, sort of a gray - a whole lot of dirty, that we know for sure. People would walk into the house and say things like "Oh! I see you guys have already painted." No we haven't! We wouldn't have chosen this! DO YOU KNOW US AT ALL?!



The green on the left is our new color, that awful color on the right is the one we eliminated every trace of.

Voila!



Note the gorgeous window! I can't stand wood trim. Maybe you didn't know that about me. So as we paint each room we're painting all the trim white - including all the windows (until we can replace them). Painting the windows, alone, makes such a huge difference in this house. We love that our house has these great, deep eaves on the outside because it affords us a lot of shade - which is great for a south-facing house - and also because unless rain is coming down horizontally we don't have too many problems with water getting into the house. The drawback is that the house can seem a bit dark even on the sunniest of days. And the orange-ish 1950s wood trim wasn't helping matters any. That 5-lite casement on the front of the house wasn't a real show stopper before, but painting it white really makes it the focal point of the room. Late last night I ordered five white roman shades for the front window and the vinyl mini-blinds that were there before are already out on the curb for garbage day tomorrow. In 4-7 days we should have them in our grubby little hands.

We also painted the dining room casement white and painted the walls a lighter shade of green on the same pallet ("Pickling Spice") but I'll save that room just in case I don't accomplish anything else this week. As I type this, Tom is painting the hallway the same shade as the dining room and is priming all the trim and doors in there so they can meet the same fate as their friends. I don't paint the doors because Tom has proven that he's a genius when it comes to painting these flat doors. I don't have the patience or the attention to detail to do it properly, and I'll freely admit it. I'm a wizard with a paint brush. As a matter of fact, I never touched any of the green paint on this weekend's projects because I spent the entire time priming and painting (and re-painting, and re-painting) all the trim and windows. Hand me a paint brush and I'll keep myself occupied for the entire day. Painting large, flat, unforgiving surfaces like the doors in this house is not a project you want to put me on.

The hallway is four doors with a little bit of wall in-between each one. We may not see Tom for weeks. We're still planning on painting the front door, also. It's just that all the hardware needs to be removed and that means we have to be able to sit around the house for a day. Tom's parents are coming to visit next weekend, so the front door will probably have to wait until the weekend after that. Darn, eh? DARN.