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!