Rewind!
Just back a few weeks.
Let’s go back to this topic of our living room FINALLY getting painted. I wanted to show you the transformation properly and give our painter, Carlos the due credit. He totally deserves like eighteen posts in his honor. I am even thinking about getting him a Christmas present because I feel like he is family now.
The rooms that needed Carlos to intervene were the living room and the foyer and the stairway. All those spaces had REALLY high ceilings. The vast amount of woodwork and prep and then time actually painting were going to be intense. But I knew that once it was done, I would need to LOVE the color because there were no re-do’s so picking the right color the first time was number one priority. The living room especially was a catch-all of old furniture. We didn’t really do much in terms of buying new things when we moved in so over time, it hasn’t ever looked better.
We did do the nooks behind the couch….adding the shelves and painting those….but the built-in’s, crown molding, floor molding, window molding and door molding all needed to be freshened up.
You can see on the far left in the photo below I started priming one section of the molding. That’s about as far as I got. I started looking around and got discouraged so the one pillar of molding was primed for about two years. I have a friend who told me that looking at it made her eyes hurt
The problem with the color was that the warm colored trim and the pale lime green of the walls created this weird almost neon glow. It wasn’t soothing or comfortable. One time I watched a documentary on color and how they can affect you. The moral of the story was….don’t paint your room fuchsia or you will go legally insane. I think this color combo was my fushcia.
The foyer and the stairs also had a ton of tan trim. I don’t know if I am going to put the gallery wall back up. I haven’t hung anything back up on the walls yet. Every morning I walk down and it is so nice and refreshing to see a clean slate and a nice wall color.
This is the view from the upstairs hall. I’m not in love with our existing light fixtures…but one thing at a time, right?!
At the end of the hall we put the book cases and somehow that rug was put down. Weird I know.
So here is what happened. I finally decided I was sick of the wall and the trim. I said to Jeremy “what I want for Christmas is the trim to be painted and I would like Christmas early this year.” I am so subtle like that. So we talked about the money thing (we knew that it would be a lot and we had saved for a long time) and he said that he thought it would be a good time because the Petersiks were coming soon and then Sherry and I could fawn over the wall color together. That’s what good friends do…stare at walls together
I called my mom who gave me Carlo’s number again and I called him. He is sometimes hard for me to understand (he drops his voice a lot so I end up being about six inches from his face listening to his words. Do you know someone like this? Basically I end up being a space-invading close-talker. It’s awkward.) and on the phone he told me that he would be available to come the very next day to give me a quote. I knew from my mom dealing with Carlos that his wife goes everywhere with him (adorable!) and that you should definitely have a number in your head for the amount you want to pay.
Carlos came. We wheeled and dealed. And then he said that he would start the next day. THE NEXT DAY. That meant we had to clear out the entire floor in a matter of hours. That night we moved everything from the living room and foyer into the dining room/office and we picked up our supplies.
Also…we did cartwheels
After it was all cleared, we felt old.
Seriously. All that lifting!
You can really tell the difference in trim color here….white vs. tan.
Don’t worry….Jeremy removed the map the next day
And there is all the stuff crammed into the dining room.
It is crazy to think that everything fit but it did. It was actually good to move everything out because then as I put things back in after it was painted, I purged the books we didn’t need or decor that didn’t look good.
Ahhh….ready for paint!
So tonight I hope to get the next stage together – the painting stage! We actually went on vacation when Carlos was finishing so we don’t have a ton of photos but enough to make height-adverse people pee their pants. Ladders are scary, people! Also…don’t judge me for the dust bunnies under the furniture. I get all itchy just thinking about them
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