Paint Please!

Wow guys, we have been BUSY! But, I'm loving it. We come home and work on the house, and spend most of our time on the weekends so far working on the house, but it's so rewarding to know this is a place we can truly make our own. I have a few blog posts planned for the next week on updates we’ve made to the house and yard. First up is the project I was most excited about: PAINTING.

These are before photos from one of the open houses we went to before making an offer. Yes, that is my seriously cool husband chatting with the real estate agent.

And yes, those are fake flowers on the mantle, along with a shell for some extra flair. Awesome.

The color of the mantle on the fireplace and the color of the wall behind it bring out all the peachy – orange – brown colors in the stone, which I’m not crazy about – they remind me of Azteca. There are a lot of other colors in the stone that I like, but they just don’t stand out because of the paint colors around it. Look at the stones on the bottom - you can see those blue and green colors in there somewhere! I think what added to the intensity of the brown paint color is that the carpeting and wall color are also very neutral and bring out more of those tan colors in the stone.



This is the dining room with the little table from the open house. For paint colors in here, we had to keep in mind that when looking out the dining room window, we would have a view of the exterior color of our garage. So, I thought about complimentary colors for the inside and outside. The paint on the walls isn't awful, but that brown isn't doing any good, either. And, more on that light fixture in a later post...

When looking at paint colors for our home, I wanted to primarily use colors that are found in nature. I wanted our home to be inspired by the water, trees, sun and sky that surround us. I also wanted to bring out those cooler blue and green colors in the stone of the fireplace, and to better coordinate with our furniture.

So, here are the after photos (apologies for the poor quality - my batteries are dead in my real camera and for now these iPhone photos will have to do)!

I painted the concrete mantle of the fire place a cool dark grey color called SEAL that I found in the Martha Stewart paint line at Home Depot. The wall behind it is a light grey color called BEDFORD GRAY, which is also the color behind the mantle. The bold wall in the dining room is a color called BLUE FIR, and then I'm going to finish it off with some trim (probably this weekend) using GULL. I was really happy with the paint, because the odor was minimal and it was low-VOC. I also liked the colors offered in the Martha Stewart paint line – it was more selective in terms of the color selection, but they offered tools to help you best select complimentary colors. 

I am very happy with the results. I like that we have a couple bold colors along with some more neutral colors. I would like to add a couple mustard – yellow colored accents, perhaps through artwork and accessories. When I initially saw the molding of the dining window, I felt like it was a little heavy, but we got some airy white curtain's we'll hang up this weekend that should help. So, I think we'll leave the dark trim.

Tools we used for painting include this brush recommended by one of my favorite home decorating and remodeling blogs, Young House Love. If you haven't read their blog, you should seriously check it out. Great DIY ideas and tutorials! I read this post a few times to get painting tips. The small handled-brush was easy to use for corners and any small spots that otherwise would have been hard to get to.

The Paint Specialist at Home Depot was very helpful. He helped me select the other rollers and items we would need for this undertaking. Since this is a project that would last a long time (we don't plan on repainting these spaces anytime soon!), he recommended these high quality rollers for the walls, which I was very happy with because they were plush and paint rolled on so smoothly (no fuzz came off while painting!). He also recommended this little guy for the fireplace because it helped get into all those little nooks and cranny's of the concrete, and since we were covering a relatively small surface.

Stay tuned this week for more updates!