New living room color!!

A haiku about our living room: AHEM

dear dark living room

lighter coat of paint I did

painful but worth it

Thank you.
You should hear my talent with dirty limericks.

Why paint the living room now? What on earth possessed me after almost 6 years of living with the same color and two days after getting a offer on the house to put myself through the ordeal of speed painting the room? Simple answer, I wanted to.

Long winded and more traditional Eva answer is that I've wanted to paint the room for a really long time and decided to just rock out the project. The maroon wall color combined with the darker floors and the big dark items of furniture all combined with the low ceiling gave the room a feeling of a cave. Even with the windows and blinds open with the sun streaming in, the whole room still would feel dark. I just never got that bright, cheery sunny feeling in the living room like I wanted.

Worth mentioning is in every single "how to sell your house" manual selling experts say to neutralize the wall colors. Despite receiving nothing but great compliments about how nice our house is decorated from almost everyone who has toured it, I felt like maybe these people did like color but wouldn't want to live with it or put forth the effort to paint over it. Or they are all big fat liars and hated the color but played nicey nice to my face.

Being that our house is on the market (with an offer on it) and ever since the warm weather showed up our showings have drastically increased. We were booking between 2-4 showings a week for a little stretch there, so down time on the house while I painted needed to be as minimal as possible. Plus, while we aren't quite done with the bathroom at the beach condo, there is also an extra project being squeezed in before Memorial Day kicks off the summer rental season. Which all means, if I wanted to get this project done then I needed to get it done ASAP because Spring weekends are fastly getting filled up with important more pressing stuff to do.

So I got off my keister and got started on the living room painting whirlwind. I moved the loveseat into the middle of the room all by myself! See the towel? I stuck that under two of the legs so I could pull the loveseat away from the wall without scratching the floor. Highly recommend doing something like that because floor scratches will put you in a bad mood. And no one wants to be in a bad mood. Then I systematically went over the walls with the hand held attachment on our vacuum, because I hate feeling like I'm painting dirt in! Ugh. It just grosses me out to think about it. The husband joined in and helped me to move some of the larger pieces of furniture and anything that I could potentially let slip out of my hands and break.


You like the painting du jour outfit? Get a peek at the ubiquitous pink renovation Uggs. I love those flipping things so much. I figure if I'm going to be busting my rear painting that my feet should be comfortable at least.



See how light and airy the dining room looks through the doorway? I just hated how this room didn't go with the lighter brighter feel of the rest of the downstairs that it is connected to.


First coat of primer done. I was really hoping to get by with just one coat of primer, but it became pretty clear that a second coat was needed. The maroon was still showing through and I really didn't want to get myself in the position of having to do more than two coats of paint.

The sun was long. long. gone by the time I started cutting in the actual paint. Walking into the room with a fresh coat of light primer though was so nice! It was so different already and I could tell I was going to love the light color! This is one of the first times I can remember with painting where the freshly applied color was much brighter than what ended up on the walls. At first the color looked like it was going to border on brighter yellow than I was going for, but in actuality it dried a very nice fresh creamy color.


It was about midnight when I got a coat of paint on the walls, which I have no pictures of because someone named me was really tired. The next morning I did the second coat of the paint and cracked open the white paint I bought for the trim...

Happily painting along I began to realize that the paint just wasn't working right. Couldn't quite put my finger on it, but the paint was definitely wrong. Turns out I bought base paint that was meant to be be tinted, not the semi gloss ultra white paint that was needed. Sigh. Since a showing was the next day there wasn't enough time to run out and get the correct paint. Problems that need solutions lead to invention and finding a solution. Which happened to be triple coating the primer on the trim. Yes, it was a pain, but I was able to get the trim completely transformed from pink to white and now when I do get the correct paint all that is needed is a quick swipe!

Here is how the living room looks today!



I love how this corner seems to be saturated in sunlight now! Before it was quite dark, you could barely see the all the books that are hiding in our secret chimney warming space. Like the antique fan? We found that in our garage! It was really gunked up with a dark gummy substance, so Pete had to wipe it down with a serious engine degunking solution. Worked like a charm though, because the fan looks great today.


Here is a quick before and after shot of the corner on the other side of the fireplace.


And one more final shot of the after! New lighter brighter color just in time for spring, love it!


If you want to follow the progression of the living room check out this post, remember it started its life as a dining room!