Well, we finally reached the point where we are starting to finish things up in the front living room.  Electricity has been run, sheet rock has been put up, taped, and bedded, and now it is time to pick out colors to use in the room.

Have I mentioned how much of a love/hate relationship I have with this task?  I have a general idea of “what” I want things to look like, but when it comes to settling on just the right color, I go into “turtle” mode – I want to run and hide.  But I know that if I let someone else do this part of the job, I will more than likely be very unhappy with the colors that are picked out, so I trudge on through it.

Funny thing about paint colors – they look different in the fluorescent lighting at the paint store than they do at home in natural lighting.  And while I wish I could just use the same color throughout the house, the truth of the matter is that what looks good in one room looks awful in another room.

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Even though we’ve already painted almost all of the rooms in the house at least once in the 29 years we’ve been here (yes, there are still a couple we haven’t tackled yet), I learn something new with every remodeling project.  This time I discovered that someone came up with a really nifty idea which allowed me to not have to paint on the walls (the thought of which had Paul almost in conniptions) but still let me see what the finished product would look like in the room – little pieces of foam-core board that you can paint on.

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I brought home lots of paint chips, as well as a couple of paint sample fans (which our local store let me “check out” for a couple of days) and finally settled on a few that I thought would look good.  Paul helped me paint each little piece of foam board, then when they dried I put them up on the mantle to see which ones stood out.

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Now, I am a huge fan of green, but it turns out that Paul doesn’t like green at all – he’s just been humoring me all these years.  So this time, we settled on a taupe/tan color that both of us really liked (“Cape Hatteras Sand”, AC-34) and which coordinated with the wood trim and the tin ceiling tiles we will be installing.  We went to the paint store and had them mix up a gallon for us (I thought we should get 2, just in case, but Paul said we only needed one….)

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Next, we taped off the few things that we didn’t want to get paint on (electrical switches, fireplace, gas line to fireplace), and Paul started painting.  Turns out we needed that 2nd gallon of paint after all, so while we were waiting for the first coat to dry, Paul drove back to the store to pick up another gallon of paint.

Oh my gosh – the room looked so nice after he got done!  We used Benjamin Moore’s “Aura” paint, and it dries really fast, so we were able to paint 2 coats in one afternoon.  It’s a little pricey, but the results are so worth it:

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Now I find myself walking into the room, just to look at the new color on the walls 😛

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