Four days, three colors and two rooms
You know those times when you need a change but you just can’t figure out what needs to change? I discovered (yet again) that painting the rooms in your house is a great, inexpensive way to make change…and best of all, it’s unchangeable if you don’t like it.
Screw you, boring
But there’s nothing I don’t like about our color choices. When we bought our house six years ago we did what many first home owners probably do - paint boring. Shy of a flower pot red kitchen, the rest of the house was pretty much off white. The bathrooms and bedroom took shades of pastel but the main living areas were as bland as my diet.
This time we know we wanted the change so we dove into some color. Actually, one color: green.
Our main living room is now green and it is a super green. The color is called asparagus, so it is a stem green color and it’s awesome. Even at its greenest in the right light, it just makes you feel good. I’ve never really ever felt modern, but having a green living room makes me feel kind of trendy. Not to mention we moved some furniture around so our upstairs living room is actually livable now. It’s like a real house now. I feel so adult.
Our new green living room. Color is called "asparagus"
We also painted the downstairs living room, the TV room, but instead of green we went with a sandy tan color…well, I thought it was a sandy tan color. It was tan on the chip and tan on the test strip, but on the wall and in the lamp light, it’s also greenish…albeit it a much lesser green, more of a sage green. But this color really changes its attitude based on the light. Sunlight makes it tan, lamp light a light green, and limited light a dark brown. It’s funny how all that education I got about color actually has some use now.
But we didn’t go all-tan downstairs. No, we also through in touch of blue, an gorgeous dark blue. It’s a nice deep blue/gray-ish color that we put on the wall behind the television, and we couldn’t be happier with the color. It really pops with the tan walls. And we loved the blue so much, we painted the wall at the end of our upstairs hall blue too, right next to the super green. I admit, it has a slight child’s playroom type feel, but it feels fun and all the colors do go well together.
An incredible blue. Love it.
It’s amazing what a fresh coat of paint will do for your rooms and for you. I feel like I’m visiting some place, waking up and going, “oh that’s nice, I should do that at home,” only to remember, wait, I am home! But lets get one thing straight, painting is not fun. Even with our trusty power painter in tow, it took four days of solid painting to cover two rooms in three colors. The only problem now is that it makes the other rooms in the house look ugly and unloved. Sorry other rooms, you’ll just have to wait your turn.
Expand your palette
It’s hard to jump into color because it’s out of most people’s comfort zone - it was out of ours too, but we just said F it and lets do it. Just make sure your colors all play nice together and you have accents that compliment your walls. All that’s left to do now is figure out where and what to hang on the walls, but we love the color so much we have to be careful not to cover too much of it up.
