Long Time Gone

Sorry, my few Loyal Readers who still check the blogs to see what's going on, that I haven't been keeping up my end of the bargain.

After months of buying new accessories, pictures and painting huge swatches of paint on the walls, we finally started the redecorating process. Picking a paint was a HUGE ordeal! After starting with the idea that we wanted a blue-green, there was the search for the right blue-green. Not too blue, not too green. Then we found the perfect drapes for the Cape Cod concept my mother desired, only the blue stripe in them was blue, not blue-green. So we had to go back and find a blue paint. It took forever but we finally settled on a color called "Lament" (hmm, should we have taken that as a warning?) After months of not getting started, one Sunday I decided we would paint the hallway ceiling first. My mom was not happy about it, I think she would have preferred to procrastinate longer. But once the ceiling was painted she got into the swing of things and decided that the walls and doors in the hallway were next.

So off to Lowe's for a gallon of Lament in an eggshell finish and white semi-gloss for the hall doors. After getting it all painted, it looked very nice, but very, VERY blue. Maybe too blue for an entire house. So my mom decided that perhaps in the living room we would have one blue accent wall and the other walls would be perhaps a dried wheat color. So off we went again in search of samples, painting them on the wall. The first was too pink, looking like we painted the wall with my makeup foundation. The second, too white, it would have blended with the furniture. The third was just right. The only problem was that it was a Dutch Boy color called "Butter Cookie" and Lowe's doesn't sell Dutch Boy. But they said they can match anything so we get a sample can. Eureka, it was perfect. A lovely lightest dried wheat shade that went with the blue and the drapes. So off I go to buy two quarts in eggshell for the kitchen.

The man mixes the paint on a very busy night (the lady next to me was buying bright apple green for a bathroom, it was a really, er, bold choice) and puts a dot of color on one of the cans. It looks really light to me but paint dries darker so at first I'm not too concerned. But as I run my other errands (we finally found a great white chair for the computer desk) I keep thinking that it's not the right color. Maybe my mom gave me the wrong paint chip. But no, when I get home, it's the right paint chip but the wrong paint. Not the color we want at all. So my mom heads to Lowe's with the paint and sample to fight it out while I get the kitchen primed (since we are painting over semi-gloss, the paint store man says we need to prime). The paint and the sample were a different mix, the lady at Lowe's agrees, but with no instructions put on the sample can, she tried mixing it several times but can't get the shade we want. So after graciously allowing us a refund, Mom heads to the Dutch Boy store and buys a quart. I paint the kitchen by myself (using some Cirque du Soleil type acrobatics) and we step back to take a look. It looks nice, but it wasn't the exact color we wanted.

So, we decide to leave the kitchen alone, as it isn't seen from most of the other rooms and can stand alone. Plus we had already found this fabulous fabric for curtains in the kitchen window. But we still needed a color for the living room walls. So Mom headed to Lowe's and got yet another sample can. This one was definitely more brown. I could tell she wasn't happy but she was resigned to having to live with it. I can't stand to see anyone unhappy so I headed to Lowe's and picked two more sample cans (if anyone needs a small sample can of paint, please call me, I have plenty laying around). One, called "Baking Stone" looked great to me, but I picked up "Bayshore" as well, just in case. Mom agreed that the paint chip of Baking Stone looked the best. But when I painted some of the sample on the wall, it was quite obviously mixed wrong. AGAIN. It was about two shades darker than the sample chip and this weird brown/green. I opened the Bayshore with little hope. I painted a swatch on the wall. And do you know what? It was almost EXACTLY the color of the sample can of Butter Cookie that they couldn't duplicate. EUREKA!!! We had the paint!

So with a few days of vacation from the bread store we got down to the hard work. I painted the ceiling - not the most fun job in the world but it looks amazing. It's truly remarkable how much your ceiling yellows after the years and how white white can be. Buy the good Kilz ceiling paint, trust me it's worth the investment (and now I have to re-paint the ceiling in the hallway because it's a different white now). Then with the help of Will and Val on Sunday we got the living room painted (I could have painted it myself but I needed help moving furniture.) The transformation is incredible, it looks like a different house.

But we still aren't done. Because the two blue accent walls were primed before painting, they are now a slightly different shade than the hallway. So I have to prime and re-paint the hall. There is one wall in the living room that was painted a little sloppy so I need to go over it again. There are touch ups all over the place. We still have to hang the new pictures and accessories. We have to put the curtains back up. We were hoping to have everything done before Thanksgiving but we won't quite be done. But since it's just the three of us for Thanksgiving (I'll post that story later) we have some time to get it done.

There are also the Christmas stockings I have been crocheting, the Graminator and her memory slide, the charity events I've been helping out with and the NaNoWriMo that I'm way behind on. That's what I've been up to. What have you been doing?