Color Cravings

Andy and I LOVE food.  Back before everyone had cell phones with cameras and instant upload capabilities to Facebook, we were taking pictures of our meals.

We have been know to take entire vacations based on what we are craving.  Shrimp on bannock bread... San Francisco!  All you can eat mussels...Asheville!  Pastries and coffee at 3 pm... Vienna!  One of the best moments at a restaurant is that second your food is placed in front of you and you know, know you made a great choice.  Everyone tastes a bite off all the plates and you can crow that yours is the best.  Alternately, one of the worst moments at a restaurant is when your plate is set in front or you and you instantly know you chose wrong.  Maybe you realize you really wanted salty and not sweet (the hardest choice when out to brunch!), maybe you expected oven roasted chicken and you got chicken fingers, regardless, you know, without even tasting that you should have picked something else.  That is how I felt when I painted our bedroom last summer.

We we first moved into the house, every room was white or had paneling.

Bedroom Before

Though I have seen lots of houses that look great with white walls accented with colorful furniture, accessories and art, we prefer to have really colorful walls that somewhat become the art of the room.  I spent hours in Home Depot choosing color swatches for the five rooms I planned to paint the week between closing on the house and the movers coming with our belongings.  After a color mistake in our first house in DeKalb, I knew to have all my color swatches together so the rooms would flow well.  I choose two colors for our bedroom- Milestone by Behr for the accent color and Manhattan Mist by Behr for the three other walls.  On the color swatches, the two colors looked pretty grey but right when I started painting, I quickly realized they were much more purple.

Bedroom in summer 2012 after first round of paint

Milestone (the darker color) was actually really beautiful but not what I had envisioned for the bedroom.  Manhattan Mist was the worst offender, turning blue in some lights and a sickly lavender in others.  It would probably suit a not-girly girls room pretty well but as I was painting, I knew instantly it was not right.  Regardless, at 8 months pregnant, all I cared about was covering the paneling so onward we went!

A year later, we finally decided to replace the orange shag carpeting in the room with hardwood and I jumped at the opportunity to repaint the walls before Andy installed the new hardwood.  I also have been working on painting all the trim in the house white (a slow process) so I jumped into the bedroom to paint the trim while we had furniture moved and no worries about dripping on the floor.

Take that, nasty shag carpet!

I brought my home improvement binder to Home Depot one night to choose the new color.  My home improvement binder sounds really nerdy but it actually helps a lot.  I have all the paint chips from each room in the house as well as magazine clippings for things I want to do in the future.  Though I was under a time crunch (I arrived at 8:45 and the store closed at 9) and nervous about making another wrong choice, amazingly enough I found it.  THE color!  Not too blue, not too grey.  Dark enough to make the bedroom feel warm and enveloping but not cave like.  Blue-Grey Slate by Glidden (I had the store color match the paint in Behr).

It took me two coats of the paint/primer in one.

I cut in with a small handle, angle brush and then rollered the walls with a 3/4" nap roller.

Amazing painting clothes picking a movie on Netflix

Plus, I had some extra "help" (she painted a picture of herself on the wall)...

Result?  A cozy, inviting room just begging you to climb to get cozy under the covers.

Trim and doors all painted white too with new black door knobs

I'm also giving you a sneak peek of the finished hardwood floors and a bookcase Andy finished this weekend.  He is on assignment to work on these posts during his 13 hour flight to China!  Hopefully the in-flight meal he chooses turns out to be Blue-Grey Slate and not Manhattan Mist...