Archives for February 2015

So I left you guys last week with a glimpse of what the house looked like after the painters came. But I didn’t have time to put the upstairs back in order and take pictures, so I’m back today with a part 2 post for you! And I think the upstairs is the biggest transformation!! So… pictures:

And I am going to apologize, I apparently got pretty light happy when taking these yesterday afternoon (I’m not used to all the sunshine we are getting in TX!) so excuse the overly lightened pictures, but the wall color is actually pretty true in most of these!

Again we went with all Light French Gray by Sherwin Williams in all of these rooms.  Eventually in this room we want to add some shelving to that wall on the right to be able to put our board games/decorations, but this room is actually probably the closest of any of them to being done.

And from the other view (the door in this picture leads to our walk-in attic storage):

For me the biggest change in the paint has been our master bedroom and bathroom:

Just to remind you where we are coming from, here are the pictures from the realtor listing: 
And now:

It looks so light and so airy! We originally didn’t have the painter painting the cabinets in the master bathroom. But the morning they showed up, he asked us about it.  So we of course said… well how much would you charge? I kid you not… his answer was $100.  We couldn’t say yes FAST ENOUGH.  And what a huge difference it has made in here! I love how fresh and clean it feels and just a lot more ‘us’.  Nothing was wrong with these rooms before, they just felt more dark and heavy than we like! It feels like these rooms are really our own now! The color in the master bathroom is Storm Cloud by Sherwin Williams (the same that is in the dining room downstairs).

The upstairs guest bathroom: (the lighting in this room is hard… why are all small bathrooms so hard to photograph!?)

The very “in progress” nursery: Those red dressers aren’t staying in there, they just haven’t had time to move to their new home in our attic storage yet.  And since we know it is a girl, that blue curtain will be coming down soon.  Oh and that boob light… has got to go.  Yay for getting to look for a fun girly light fixture for baby girl’s new nursery!

The office/craft room looks a little sad since I stole it’s bedspread for our master bedroom! Now I need to hang some pictures and find a new bedspread and this room won’t be quite as sad!

And that concludes the upstairs with fresh paint! Stay tuned this week since I’ll have another baby update and a garage update for you! Spoiler Alert: you can walk through the garage now. AMAZING.

So remember this list of all the things we want to do to the new house? My mom called me that night and said: I’m tired just reading this list.  And honestly I kind of felt the same way! I love projects as much as the next person and seeing the house transform over time, but as the husband and I were talking, we realized that ‘paint this room’ showed up on almost ALL of the rooms on our To Do List.   If he and I were left to paint all of those rooms ourselves, it would be 5 years before we get the house painted… and probably the tall stairway would never get painted.

So this happened this week (want to see the before pictures? Click here):

We decided to bite the bullet and hire out the house painting.  All I have to say is Best. Decision. Ever.  These guys were awesome, a week and a half after calling them, they came, moved all the furniture, took what few things we had hung on the walls off, patched our holes, and painted THE WHOLE HOUSE in 2.5 days.  Seriously… all of it. I only have pictures of downstairs because everything was drying and needed to be put back and pictures taken… I’ll show you those next week.  Since I only had a week and a half to pick Sherwin Williams Colors (which I’d never really used before) I spent a long time googling/pinteresting colors and we mostly decided to paint the whole house just one shade of gray, except the Dining Room and Master Bathroom are a darker blue color.

I painted 6 different gray swatches on the wall, but ended up settling with Light French Gray (the painter used all Sherwin Williams level 200 paints… which bonus are 0 VOC which means they don’t smell all that bad and are safe to be around for baby).

I love this color! It is exactly what I was hoping for- a very cool gray that doesn’t have much (if any beige undertones) but also doesn’t read as blue.  It definitely makes our white kitchen and white trim pop!

Since all these spaces are so connected we wanted to go with the same color in all of them to make them feel like one large space- and while they were at it I had them paint the laundry room the same color.  I need to do some other things to make our laundry room more functional: like a drying rack, another shelf there on the left side, but since this is right off our kitchen, it has great storage space for us and is also the perfect space for Lexie’s food and water. And because the husband and I are super short… we need a step stool. But with this little step stool I can reach everything without having to climb on the dryer, which is getting harder to do as the months progress!

Then in the Dining Room we went with Sherwin William’s Storm Cloud which I found because I found a bathroom on Pinterest done in Jubilee and liked the shade, but wanted it darker and moodier, so I just dropped down a spot on it’s swatch.  I worried a little that it would be too dark, but I think with such a large room with so many windows it ended up PERFECTLY.

I definitely want a new light fixture above the table, and desperately need some curtains on the window in the picture above, but I love the way this room is coming together!

It is definitely still a work in progress (and I didn’t notice that they didn’t center the piano… guess I should go home and fix that) but I could not be happier with the color!!

It feels like a brand new house! I’ll be back next week with the upstairs pictures… you won’t even recognize our master bathroom and bedroom… HUGE transformation!