We bought a house. Actually, we didn’t just buy any old house. We bought the house we have lived in for two years. You know how long two years is? It is exactly the amount of time it takes to live somewhere and learn everything about the place worth hating.
So all that exciting new house purchase juju? Yeah, we got nothin’.
It’s ok though, we have set aside some money to make a few (million) changes to the place, starting with painting nearly every interior wall.
We’ve done this before, a lot. We’ve owned four houses and we’ve painted every wall in all of them at least once. This time, we are only doing some of the work ourselves and farming some of it out to a wonderful friend, who, lucky for us, just happens to do this kind of thing for a living. Actually, he does much more detailed and heavy work than painting but he’s being kind to us and starting there before we have him start to tear down walls and rip up floors. That will come soon.
But, first, we paint.
The tricky part with this paint job was knowing what colors to use to give the home some more light. We have a western exposure ( I think. I’m not great at that stuff but I know it’s brighter at night than in the morning so that suggests sunset light right?) and currently the house is very dark. We’re hoping by lightening up the paint colors we’ll brighten up our rooms.
My problem is I love a rich paint so trying to lighten it up and stay true to my adoration of jewel tones is tricky. We’ve gotten wise in our old age and have had samples on the walls for weeks so we can measure in each light of day how the colors work on the walls. We’ve been burned one time too many by lemon yellow walls appearing where “soft churned butter” was expected. Now we know, paint with a sample first and mix later.
We decided to go with dark on an accent wall in the living room and dark on the bottom half of the wall in the dining room. That way I’m happy with the depth of color and The Husband is happy with the fact that we no longer live in a black hole. The living room is Pantone’s Amaranth and the dining room is Eclipse. (For regular people, that’s eggplant and navy.) We picked a blush white to go with the eggplant and a grey white to go with the navy.
Believe it or not, the whites are the hardest colors to pick. I have rented for close to five years now. I did not want more neutral walls! I wanted light colors that had the tint of their dark partners. We think we accomplished that with our choices.
Here’s hoping the marathon trip to the home improvement store proves worthwhile. We’ve got gallons and gallons of paint, yards of tape and enough spackle to fill in any black hole. Now we just cross our fingers that all the paint chips we fell in love with make us just as happy covering the whole wall.
Let there be light!
