Family Day? Painting Day!

How was your Family Day (or Presidents' Day) long weekend? Ours was pretty great. We actually got something accomplished. I know! You're as surprised as I am. Especially if you consider that our kitchen still looks the same as it did 4 months after starting the Great Cabinet Makeover.

But we're not talking about that; we're talking about the bedroom. It has been painted. Finally. We've been here for four years and have been living with this:

So many problems. First, the plaster finish on only the upper half of the wall. It looked dirty. And outdated. And I really don't like yellow anyway. Then there was the chair rail - I guess to provide a transition from the top to the bottom. Way to cut the room in half and make it look smaller.

Note to homeowners - before you put a serious faux finish on your wall, ask yourself these questions - "Is this your forever house?" or "Are you planning on staying more than a few years?" If the answers are no then please, please, think about the people who are living there after you.

So we haven't done anything with the room until now. I didn't even try to dress it up for the before pictures. (Yes, those curtains are terrible in here - but they block the light.)

We contemplated scraping the (plaster?) off and smoothing it over, but since this is also not our forever home, it just wasn't worth the effort and expense. Instead we chose to paint everything one colour - including the chair rail - hoping that would draw the eye up and make the room look larger. We chose Benjamin Moore's Artic Seal.

A bit of a difference, isn't it? I wanted something dramatic that would still go with the neutrals throughout the rest of the house. We also gave the trim a coat of bright, white semi-gloss paint - a step up from the builders' beige already there.

That trim knocked us off schedule. As I was taping over the trim in anticipation of painting the room, I mentioned to Tom that the wood didn't feel as smooth as the trim in the hallway. I grabbed the can of paint and realized that I had used eggshell instead of semi-gloss. I sat there frozen for a minute, but I wasn't even a quarter of the way around the room with the tape so I figured it was easier to just rip it off and get a coat of the semi-gloss on now. (As an aside, Tom is taking full responsibility for bringing me the wrong paint - though I guess I should have read the can myself.) We could have just gone with the eggshell, but I like the feel of semi-gloss, and it's easier to keep clean when you have dogs throwing dirt all over the place.

So the paint is on the walls and I brought in some silvery-grey curtains from another room. But why aren't there more pictures? Because I haven't hung any art or even made the bed yet. After all this work I'm not showing you a half-finished room.

How about I leave you with the happy, almost-smiling crew at the end of Day 2. Aren't we adorable?