How Behr MARQUEE Paint Saved My Marriage

Alright so maybe that title is a little bit of an exaggeration, but only a little bit.

When we bought La Casa de King in March, we immediately embarked on painting the entire thing. It was a collection of hideous colors in each room and I couldn’t live with the dirty yellow walls and pea-green trim for any longer. (See? Told you. Hideous.)
We left the huge painting jobs in the living and dining room to a pro, but I had an offer to try the new MARQUEE line from Behr so we decided we would use these in the boys’ bedroom and make it a family painting affair.

What you can’t tell from this picture is how old and dry that yellow is. This was a job for serious paint.

We gave the boys some say in the colors and The Baby picked a color whose brightness matched his personality so we decided that would be the closet door color because, while lovely, it wasn’t the best idea for an entire room! Luckily for me, The Middle One is fairly amenable so I was able to gently nudge him to a less eye-popping color for the walls. Behr Marquee, etched glass is actually so delicious a color that it’s probably good the living and dining rooms were already painted because I might have just rolled over all the walls with this paint. It is the perfect pale blue-gray and it is exactly what it looked like on the swatch. How often does that happen? I’ll tell you, never.
Our lives are so insanely busy that the paint sat for weeks taunting us before we found a weekend to paint. And when I say we, I actually mostly mean The Husband because I was away on retreat when he started. I might be the worst wife ever. I concoct these grand plans, get the kids all hyped up and then ditch town. Yikes.

After the taping, before Behr redeemed me.

In my defense, The Husband says he likes to paint. But it didn’t take long before I was getting text messages and phone calls about how filthy the boys’ room was and how taping and trim-work were torture.
I came home just in time for phase two which meant I did cutting in while trying to buffer his criticism that I was holding the brush wrong, or maybe not using enough paint or any other various critique you can yell from atop a ladder.

He’s yelling at me from that ladder. Paint Jerk.

Here is the thing, with all the sniping, we actually enjoyed ourselves because the Behr Marquee was so easy to roll on. It is a paint/primer combination and the formula is so rich that it went on like butter and managed to cover the old, dry walls in only two coats. The Husband actually said the paint made him less angry. He even started to enjoy himself. Thanks be to the gods!

That’s ONE coat of blue. Insane.

The rest of our house took at least three, with a different paint. We finished the room pretty quickly and our boys were quite happy to return to their ocean-blue oasis. The Husband and I were happy to be done the team paint. Next time, I’ll stick with projects I can tackle single-handedly. Etched-glass bathroom, here I come!

The finished product. Mess and all! (That dresser is next. Which MARQUEE color should I choose?)