Paint By Numbers

After living in our house for a few months we decided it was time to adjust some of the paint colors.   Many of the colors the previous owners chose we loved however, the color of the living room we weren't as crazy about.   It wasn't offensive or anything just a bit too much pale yellow-y beige-y.  We are hoping to go for more of a blue/grey shade.   The room has beige carpet, maple colored trim and white baseboards,  in addition there is also a brick fireplace.  We needed to keep this all in mind when picking colors to make sure everything would tie together nicely

We stopped at Home Depot and picked up 8 samples.   Right away we could eliminate 3 or 4 of them.   Color #1, 3 and 7 we our favorites so we took the night to think about it.  If you are wondering were color #4 is, we tested it on a different wall and didn't like it.  The color was such a light gray I couldn't really photograph it well.

We finally settled on "school house slate" from the Martha Stewart line (paint color #1).   It wasn't too blue or too gray.   It took us about 5 hours to paint the two coats, which actually seems fast for a 20x30 ft. room.   Nick hates cutting/trim and I'm not crazy about rolling so we making a pretty mean painting team!

Before:

After:

The new slate blue-gray helps make the room seem smaller, which normally wouldn't be what one would go for but it's really a massive room.   The color makes it feel more cozy and home-like.

Our hope is to add white crown molding at some point to coordinate with the white baseboards, not sure if I want to paint the window molding white yet.  We also still need to address the stairwell upstairs.  The walls and ceiling are quite high and we weren't sure if we wants to have the new color go all the way up the stairs and hall or do something different.

If you can't buy it, build it

Happy New Year!  Here's to 2014!

Our new house is almost double the size of our last house.  Double the size means double the amount of furniture needed.   Moving in itself is costly, so there wasn't much left in our budget for furniture.  We did purchase a new couch, bed and mattress, but that was it.   Nick thought this might be a good opportunity to build our own furniture and save some money.  He had taken a few woodshop classes in high school and he really liked it however, he hadn't built anything in years.    In searching for easy to follow plans, he found Ana White's website.   It's fantastic, with so many options and its fun to see how others, who followed the plans, projects came out .    So far he has built a coffee table and dining room table and plans to try out more.

His first project was a coffee table for our living room.   Here it is unfinished before we stained and painted it.

We saw some where (not sure if it was a magazine or blog) a driftwood color stain and instantly loved it.   We decided to spray paint the legs cream for a two tone look.   The table is the perfect size for the space.

Our next project was building a dining room table.   When we have family over, it can be up to 10 people, so we knew we wanted a table large enough to seat everyone.   The dining room is luckily a long room so we had a good amount of space to work with.

We chose a walnut color stain that would stand out from the blonde maple colored floors.  I just love how its rustic feel pops against the formalness of the room.

It was so nice to have in place before the holidays.  We are using chairs currently, from the kitchen table but soon will have two 8ft. church pew benches on either side.   Can't wait to have those in place.