When we were looking to move into our current rental, one of the first things we asked the realtor was "will we be able to paint here?"And this is why:
This is from the kitchen looking into the dining room/living room
From the living room looking into the dining room/kitchen doorway.
I was too horrified to take more pictures of this. I wish we had the pictures from the listing actually. The place is in good shape other than the original paint choices. These colors were repeated in the bedrooms upstairs: the master being the same intense blue of the kitchen, Little Miss's room the same green, and the office was the same camel color. Now to give our landlords credit, they agreed that they didn't pick the best colors, and told us that we were welcome to paint (I suspect they were a little relieved actually) as long as we picked more neutral colors.
So before we moved in, we picked some colors and got to painting. This was accomplished over a looong weekend (thurs-sunday), mostly by my Mother-in-Law who graciously flew in to help us, and a few other dedicated friends. I did as much as I could, but 3 month old babies take quite a bit of time. I became rater adept at cutting in though, if I do say so myself.
We picked Behr Chocolate Froth in satin for downstairs, and the shade darker, Wheat Bread in eggshell for the bedrooms.
Look! Luna even got into painting! What a good helper...
I love the Wheat Bread color. It is a warm gray, that looks a bit like putty, or clay in a nice cozy way. I would have put that downstairs too... but I can't remember why I didn't. There was a reason though.
The original plan was to get a quart of a different color for an accent wall in the kitchen and one in the master bedroom. Not wanting to spend the extra $30 it would have cost, I decided to get creative. With the help of a friend- and by help I mean I stole her idea and borrowed her stencil for an extended amount of time- I decided to pull the trigger on the accent walls. I decided on a 12 inch stripe for the kitchen wall, and a semi-organic-modern type stencil pattern for the master bedroom. I decided to just use the extra paint that we had and go for a more subtle tone-on-tone look, rather than an in your face new color.
The stripes on the kitchen wall took maybe 3 hours total. They were pretty quick, and I love the result.
Unfortunately, this is the only picture I have at the moment, complete with my cookie-cutter Christmas decorations. I will post more later.
The stencil took SIGNIFICANTLY longer. I think I spent a total of 15 hours on this, stretched over several weeks. I could have saved about 3 hours, but it took me time to refine my technique. I could have also saved some time had I been willing to shell out for a bigger stencil like the one here, but I wanted to keep this on the cheap. So I used that little stencil to make 210 tiles on the wall, along with about 30 half-tiles on the bottom and side borders to fill things in. I was dragging my feet for so long that I made a promise to myself that I would finish it before we left for Christmas break. So it was my present to myself.
The part that took the longest was making the registration marks, but that was also the most important. It allowed me to do tiles at random and not wait for things to dry, like you see above. Had I been smart, I would have started at the top middle of the wall and used a level. I would have done the registration marks for the top row first, then filled down. What I actually did was start in the top left corner and work down and out from there. In the picture below, you can see how the wall bows a bit, which made things wonky, and I somehow angled upward, so that by the time I reached the opposite wall, I was off by about half of one of the tiles. In the picture below you can see the blue painters tape dots on the very top stop about 6 in... thats how quickly I stopped being able to get to the top of the wall...
Fortunately though, there are no strong horizontal lines in this pattern, and when you look at the whole wall you can barely tell. Especially when I don't show you a picture of the top or bottom of the wall... :)
I LOVE the result, and it is motivating me to finish up some other changes I will be making. I already have fabric to make a couple shams, and Alex and I are talking about re-painting the (free) headboard and the drawers on the side tables. He even tossed out the idea of letting me paint them a dark gray-ey-purple-ey color. This is big people. This is big.
