Color - the first week

This week we dug into the biggest project we've undertaken on our house, new paint and carpet. I was okay with new carpet, but the whole painting thing had me on edge. It didn't help that Yvonne wanted color in the house. See, I've lived my whole life with white houses. Color was for carpet, rugs, curtains, etc., not for walls. I was nervous, to say the least. But Yvonne has pretty good color sense so she finally talked me into it and that really helped that I felt I could trust her judgement.

Of course, we had to add to the project. We were tired of some of the lighting that was left over from the 80's it seemed. (We've found some of our lights still for sale at Lowes and Home Depot. Scary!!) I also wanted to add a ceiling fan to the front room because it has just been stuffy this year.

So after a couple of months of research and procrastination we dug into the project last Friday. Progress has been good. After one week we have painted three rooms and installed half of the new lighting. Woohoo!

We started with Brynley's room and the kitchen's over-the-sink light fixture. Friday night we started emptying her room. Saturday morning I replaced the light fixture and we headed to town to get the rest of the parts we needed and the first cans of paint, ceiling white and light yellow. The rest of the afternoon was spent taping and prepping and painting the ceiling and base boards. Monday, Yvonne followed up with the walls and that night we moved Brynley back in.



What difference light makes! The darker one is actually more accurate.


Tuesday, we moved Braden out and Yvonne painted the baseboards and followed up with the ceiling that night after I got back from Elders Quorum visits. Wednesday, Yvonne painted the walls and we moved Braden back in. It's kind of hard to see his color, but it looks really good.



Thursday night we started the lighting in the front room. I don't have a picture of it yet, but we really like the change. Our home teacher, Scott, helped us put in four cans and wire them in, which required a couple of visits to the attic to complete. Not to mention we had to put all the insulation back that fell out while we were cutting the holes for the cans. We had plastic all over the front room.

We knocked out the old 3-gang switch box and put in a new 4-gang box, added new rocker style switches and a new and improved dimmer switch for the recessed lights. Another great improvement. Since it took so long to do that we will finish the lights in the kitchen this week, hopefully, as well as the attic vent/fan that we are adding to move the air better up there.

We then moved on to the bathroom on Friday and Saturday. We had to cover up a few things and repair a few spots on Friday so we could paint on Saturday, but we still managed to get the ceiling and baseboards done on Friday. Saturday morning our friend Will came and took our mirror off the wall so we could paint everything. He is bringing us a new mirror Tuesday that will cover the entire width of the counter. I can hardly wait as it is about 60"x40". Saturday's painting went pretty well outside of a few jovial mishaps between us. Yvonne couldn't keep her roller on the wall while painting around the shower head and I couldn't keep my hands off the wall, not mention that little oops of trying to improve a corner and painting on the wrong wall (aka, ceiling) with our pin roller. Ooops!

Needless to say, there were a few touchups we had to take care on ceilings later that day. As a side note, always buy 2" tape when painting. The smaller stuff isn't worth it!

I'm afraid the color doesn't show well here, but it turned out nice and we like it.


So, tomorrow we begin work on our bedroom. Ugh. The worst room in my opinion. Not the hardest, but the worst. I detest moving our room around as we have all the heavy furniture. But, we'll deal with. We hope to go looking at carpet as well, but we'll see what the holiday does to that goal.

Now to get used to having color all over. I think it is really going to hit me when our room is finished as it will be the first room I have to spend any amount of time in so far. I'm just in and out of the kids' rooms and the bathroom, but not the bedroom. Oh, well. There's no stopping this freight train now!