Perhaps you haven’t heard about the house paint color saga over here during the past two months? I’m quite certain J. is ready to divorce me over it by now, but we are so, so, so, very, very close to having a completed and fully painted home. And was all of the angst worth it?

Absolutely.

Last summer we started noticing how much our house needed a fresh coat of paint so I started squirreling tax refund money away (painting a house is EXPENSIVE when you don’t diy, and this is one project I will never attempt to do-it-yourself!) and we’ve been on the hunt for paint colors.

Those of you who have been around the block with me a few times know that I am SO not very decisive when it comes to picking paint colors. I love to look at them, debate them, and am always finding colors I like…I just can’t decisively pick a color to save my life.

Finally we narrowed it down to a color scheme that we liked on a house just down the street from us…also a Spanish style home with a lot of black wrought iron accents like ours. I have always liked the house, it seems homey and “well-put together” (can a house be well-put together?) with a nice neutral scheme that can work with a lot of different accent colors.

Yes, I suppose I could have gone up and just asked them what their taupe base color was. And yes, I suppose that would have saved me countless hours of agony. But it just felt a little creepy in a stalker-I-want-to-totally-steal-your-house-paint-color sort of way, so instead I sample painted up almost every corner of our house. Each day Jason (our friend who painted for us) would stop over or J. would come home, and they’d just sit and shake their head at me. In my defense, it is really hard to imagine what this tiny patch of paint will look like on a two-story, huge expanse of stucco. It was nerve-wracking. I did not want to get the color up there and find out too late that the taupe was “too poopy colored” or that it looked like a penitentiary because it was too gray.

Finally on the very last day before we left for our Michigan trip, I basically did an eenie-meanie-miney-mo between the two colors I had narrowed it down to, and voila! Garden Wall by Behr it was.

So we left and when we returned found that our freshly painted house looks like an entirely brand new home.

A variety of shots in many different times of day/light. I couldn’t love it any more if I tried.

Wellllll….that’s not entirely true. Jason had said that the front door really needed a “pop.”

If it was black (like it was supposed to be) it would be way too black hole-ish (yes, he did use that word) in the courtyard since we did all of the french doors in black. So he suggested the blue that is in our tile around the fireplace (bet you never even knew that tile was there, did you? NOW you see it. It is actually accented and so pretty!) and I said, “go for it.”

I didn’t love it. I didn’t really even like it. It was so…bright? Vibrant? BLUE?! So we toned it down and took the green color out of the tile, especially since I have a lot of vintage green pots and courtyard goodies already and just darkened that up. I actually haven’t seen the end result in person yet. We are on vacation (yes, again!) and Jason just texted this photo to me, but I think I like it better already.

Yes, as you can see…that is just one side of the door, we totally had another 2 week long debate on colors just for the door, too. The light green-ish one you see there in the before shot, third one down, was our winner for awhile. It is close to the pot I have in the corner under our mailslot there in the “after” photo. But I worried that it would be just too “bright” too, especially with the more subdued taupe and blacks we had going on. So we went with Catalina Coast there in the middle.

What do you think? I think I can’t wait to get home and see it in person. And I think that I never want to paint the house again. For not doing any of the “real work,” this project sure was exhausting.

Please tell me who thought it was a good idea to buy a nearly century-old house and that it would be “fun” to fix and update it all up?

Ohhh….right. Me. Yes…well…it was a truly brilliant idea. And since all brilliant ideas in my household seem to lead to even bigger and brighter ideas, today I’ll give you a sort of half unveil of our new bedroom. And then we’ll do a run down of the waterfall of projects that have stemmed from just wanting a new color on our walls.

If you recall, we decided after four years of living with our old lady wallpaper it was time to give our bedroom a new color. We roughly agreed on the color and after two coats of paint (Behr paint & primer in one – best paint ever! Color: color-matched to the Martha Steward color Hydrangea), we have arrived at this…

I’m still not completely in love with the color. In the morning it is a little too light and blue for what I was going for. But in the late afternoon, it is exactly what I was hoping for…a nice dark blue. And at night it is perfect. So it stays.

And of course the new paint needed some new bedding…

…and I loved the blues, greens and browns in this duvet. And then once I opened it up I was thinking it isn’t too girly, so J. might like it and then I spotted the BIRDS! Love it…so it also stays. (And then I ended up getting it for $19.99 at Target on clearance when I went back for a price adjustment – so it most definitely stays!!)

But now? You knew that was coming, right? Yes…now, the black bed and nightstands are too…black. I think I’m going to repaint the bed a chocolate brown – it needs to be something other than that black. And I am toying with doing something to the nightstands so it isn’t all so matchy-matchy, too.

And notice how our behemoth of an armoire is over by the door now…it is slowly making its way out of our room. No, not on its’ own accord, but I purposely didn’t move it back to the corner so that we could easily move it out of the room. I have a plan for that as well that I haven’t quite sold J. on yet. We’ll see, you might see that armoire as the star of Crafty Tuesday in the not so distant future.

I want to put a little chaise and bookcase/library area over where the armoire used to live – which is a totally non-essential project, but it is staying on the “list.”

Oh…and also notice how we have no door on our bedroom right now, too? Well, once the color went on the walls it was obvious we needed to repaint the trim and I have visions of a nice, glossy white on all of the woodwork upstairs. And once I started looking to paint the doors, I realized that they are already 5 coats thick with paint and peeling…so I took our door down and started the stripping process. THREE DAYS AGO. I just rehung the ONE stripped door this evening. And only have a mere TEN more doors to go upstairs. At this rate, I’ll be lucky to get the upstairs done before Christmas.

And we need baseboards, too. Apparently someone decided to remove the baseboards at some point in time and just put the quarter-inch round shoekicks back up, which were also very shabby. So add baseboards in all three bedrooms to the list.  Which seemed completely do-able until as I was painting realized that we have rounded bullnose corners at all the archways.

These crazy “great” ideas, they never seem to help cross anything off this mythical list.