paint swatches

Now that the tile is up in the guest bathroom, I'm a little dubious about the color we had picked out - we picked it before we picked the tile and now I'm not sure it isn't a little too purple. So I picked up a bunch of paint swatches at Home Depot yesterday and we'll re-pick a color this weekend.

color choices

We went to Home Depot last weekend to pick up a few things and also get paint swatches to choose colors for the upstairs rooms. I told Don that it felt very strange to be looking at paint colors "for real" - rather than me just dragging him to go poke at them, when he isn't even close to ready to think about them yet because paint is such a long way off. He laughed at me and reminded me that we'd already chosen - and painted! - the downstairs colors, so I should be over it. I'm not.

Even more surreal - and this one is from both of us - is going to Home Depot and not having to park near the contractor entrance, or get a gigantic cart. We're not used to just walking in the doors like normal people yet.

Here's the color palette upstairs, minus the color on the landing (which is the same light brown/beige as in the living and dining rooms):


From left to right: Yellow for the middle bedroom, hopefully to be a nursery very soon; a warm gray with hints of plum for the guest bathroom; a purple-plum color called "Gypsy Magic" for the guest room; a deep greenish blue called "Nature Retreat" for the master bedroom, and a lighter shade from the same swatch for the master bath.

I hope they all look good on the walls!

a studious color

Before the flooring was delivered, we made an effort to get the downstairs painted. As I mentioned before, we paid a painter to paint everything that is the same color, but the office gets its own color, so I painted it myself.

We chose an absolutely gorgeous olive green called "Carriage House" by Behr, and I think it's the perfect color for an office/library. It's going to look amazing with the brown floors and a big wall of brown bookshelves (can I tell you how excited I am about the prospect of unpacking my books?)

oh, did i mention?

We have color.


We did something that we both thought we'd never do, and actually paid somebody to paint. A friend of our drywaller gave us a ridiculously good price to bring in his paint sprayer and spray all of the public areas (dining room, office, living room, stairwell, landing, and all the ceilings thereof) with primer and then roll on paint. Since the dining room, living room, stairwell, and upstairs landing all flow into each other with no breaks, we elected to paint them all the same color, and were able to take advantage of the deal.

We'll paint everything else ourselves, but I can tell you straight up that it was worth EVERY PENNY to have somebody else paint the two-story stairwell, which involved precariously balancing on a plank stretched from a ladder to the top of the stairs. Not my thing.

End result? It looks great, and has saved us a ton of time. Even better, we were able to get this huge amount of space painted before the hardwood floors are in, which makes everything easier. I plan on painting the last of the downstairs spaces - the office - this weekend. It's closed off from the open area, so it'll be a different color, which is why it wasn't included in the deal. It is primed and the ceiling has been finished, though, so it won't take much work.

PS - If you're wondering, the color we chose is Behr's Pecan Sandie, in eggshell. I'm very happy with it - it looks even better in person than it does in pictures, and picks up the natural sunlight we get an abundance of very nicely.