I'll give you one guess, as to what we have been up to . . .
Yep, We've been painting again! There weren't that many rooms left to paint but the rooms that were left were the hard ones; hard because of the inconvenience of having these rooms in disarray.
When we first moved in I really like the color of our house, but after living in it for a few months I realized the walls, ceiling and even the carpet and tile were the same color as the outside of our house which was also the same color as the dirt/sand outside. I was living in a monochromatic world. Not matter how much you like something, when it is the same all the time it drives you a little nutty. To save my sanity we needed to add some color, some places received a lot more color than others, but at least now we have some variety.
Our first big "inconvenience" room to be painted was the kitchen. Paul was motivated to get the kitchen done quick, the primal need to eat I suppose, and actually it turned out not not be so terrible after all.
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Talk about adding color, it's RED! We debated for many months as to which shade of red we wanted and which walls to paint (you know just an accent wall). Then one day after there were splotches of paint on various walls in the kitchen Paul says, "Let's just paint them all. If we don't like it we can paint over it." I didn't give him a chance to change his mind and quickly agreed. (Secretly that is what I wanted all along.) I will admit that once it was all done I had wondered what we had done, but after a couple of days I came to my senses and I absolutely LOVE it!
One the of things that has made our painting projects such a large undertaking is that we have been painting the ceilings as well. (Thus the picture with paint all over Paul's head and face). The ceilings had been the same color as the walls which was a bit darker that I would like. Because of this the next room was an especially large undertaking, the living room; which then extends into the hall ways and the
dinning room piano/exercise/play room. Finding a place to put all of the furniture was a bit tricky, but we managed. This project took several late nights by both Paul and I as we worked together as a team to get the job done as quickly as possible.
Our painting endeavors were affectionately referred to as "date night". We aren't so good at going on dinner dates, but one night as Paul was using the roller and I was taking a brush to the edges and corners, chatting as we went, I realized that is OK we don't do on "real dates." Why? Because a painting date is way more fun than dinner out any day, and a lot more memorable.
We used several colors in these areas; one for the ceiling, three different colors for the walls. We were rather ambitious. Paul learned a new skill, thanks to the guys at Sherwin Williams, in the process; how to make a straight, clean line where two colors come together. He even did a beautiful job on the arch ways.
We knew we couldn't drag this project out any longer when one day Elizabeth says to me, "When can we have a
normal house?" I didn't quite know what she meant, until she continued, "You know, one that doesn't have plastic and blue tape everywhere." That spurred me along to get all of the trim work painted and complete the project in time for Easter.
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It has been fun and looks beautiful. I love the clean feeling of fresh paint and having walls that are free of holes. Our painting days are done for now. The only places that are left to paint are the inside of the closets, laundry room and the garage. I don't have any plans to paint any of those, yet Paul likes to joke that we should paint the laundry room or garage with all of our extra paint; we have quite a stack, and enough paint chips to open a paint store.
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