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Livingroom Revamp - During

So we spent the entire weekend painting. After a quick detour on Friday night to Big Daddy's for some wings.  We went over to the bar area for a drink while we waited for our order.  Probably not a good idea.  Rum & coke on an empty stomach meant that not much got done when we got home.

If you remember, this was our livingroom before.  For more detail of the "before" check it out here.  We were tired of the orange (you can say terracotta but I'm gonna call it orange), yellow, and green.  Really tired.

Friday night I finished up the sanding, edging the walls with white and generally cleaning up the dust. 

Bright and early Saturday morning we started with the taping.  Some people are very good at cutting in and rolling without taping, and I've painted quite a bit, but I still like to have the extra insurance of tape.  We used 3M's Scotchblue painter's tape with Edge-Lock and I'm not sure they're going to ask me to do a commercial anytime soon.  I really didn't see any improvement over the usual green tape.  There was still some bleed-through here and there.  I think in the future I'll just save my pennies and keep buying the cheaper stuff.

  

What we were impressed with was the Benjamin Moore paint we purchased.  Now I see why the salesclerk gave us a funny look when we said we usually use 1.5 - 2 gallons of paint per room.  It took just one can to do the entire livingroom.  Two coats. We only needed to open the second can to continue into the diningroom area. This paint went on so smoothly.  The two pictures below are after just one coat.

Coverage was amazing, and there was no backspray when rolling.  In fact I had barely any paint on my hands when I was finished.  I used a sponge roller this time and I am in love with it.  Smooth rolling and easy to clean.  They dry fast too.  We learn a little bit more each time.

So how about some pictures?  I only have a few, and it was dark by the time we finished cleaning up, so by no means is the room finished.  In fact, the furniture was put down helter skelter, just to have a place to sit. 

I want to wait at least a week before we put the outlet covers back on and hang the artwork we have.  I also need to paint all of the trim as it's still builder's white and I want it to be bright white.  I'm also going to paint the fireplace white.

Then it's on to choosing curtains and curtain rods, and all of the other decorations.  And maybe I'll even get around to adding pictures to the gallery wall frames. :-)

Livingroom Revamp - Before

I've been wanting to paint our livingroom for a long, long time.  You've heard (read?) me refer to it many times as the mexican restaurant.  This is not how it's usually decorated.  I just didn't add anything back after I took down the Christmas decorations.

  

Gallery wall with less than half the frames filled in.  Yeah, someday.

The big problem, besides picking a colour, was figuring out when we'd have enough time to do it.  We realized that it was going to have to be spread out over a couple of weekends.  The first one to pick out & purchase paint, then make sure we have all of our supplies, the second one to actually paint.  With some spackling and sanding during the week between.  It's Thursday night and we're not done with the sanding.  I'm worried for our schedule. 

I've been pinning paint colours onto Pinterest for the last few weeks.  All of them are in the neutral, grey-beige-taupe family.  Truth be told, they all look kind of the same online. I wanted something not only for the livingroom but that can flow throughout the first floor and perhaps up the stairwell.

Something relaxing and rich.  Not too dark because there isn't a lot of light other than in the livingroom, but nothing anemic-looking either.  We took my list of paint colours to the nearest Benjamin Moore and I have to say, the saleswoman was fantastic.  Her name is Kim and I think I love her.  I rattled off my list of paint colours while she zoomed up and down the paint wall grabbing chips.  I was expecting to have to find them myself but she had them all within a couple of minutes.  I then showed her a sample of our tile, our kitchen cabinet wood, and our furniture fabric, and she quickly began eliminating colours that wouldn't work, explaining why each time.  We narrowed it down to a few and finally settled on Ranchwood.

(Side note: a few months ago I had torn a page out of Style at Home magazine of a paint colour that I liked but I forgot to take it to the store with me.  Guess what colour it was?  Yep, Ranchwood.  I think it was meant to be.)

It looks more grey here. Maybe it's just my monitor. The shade is very close to the colour of the furniture, but I think with accent colours - haven't picked them yet - it won't look monochromatic.  I was concerned with finding something that would go with the green cabinets in case we stain them dark brown or paint them bright white.  Or leave them green because we run out of money.  (And yes, we are definitely replacing those white appliances.)

We're also limited by the tile colour.  In the kitchen and hallway it's not so bad, but the fireplace is also tiled with the terra-cotta orange. Tom is strongly against me painting them white.  How much worse could it be?

We hadn't planned on buying the paint there, just picking out the colour, but Kim's superior customer service won us over.  We had expected it to take most of the day but we were home with our paint in less than 2 hours.  So we got right to taking the room apart. 

The previous owners had installed surround-sound in the livingroom and removing the wire covers meant removing quite a bit of paint (and some drywall).

This is what's slowing down our progress.  We've spackled and sanded that wall for days.  Tom finally cut down into the drywall to form a shallow trench and then spackled on top of it.  There are also dozens of dents and holes in the walls.  I don't think they did any prep before they painted the orange.

I love this shot.  It looks like we have 16 foot ceilings.

Tonight I'm going to start painting around the ceiling, baseboards and windows with white the same way I did in the bathroom.  This takes care of any colour from the previous paint job being visible on the ceiling or trim.  I'm hoping to be able to start taping tomorrow night after work and then I might have something more to show off by the end of the weekend.

Wish me luck!