Painting Round 2

With the hardwood flooring complete in the downstairs spaces, we could now turn our attention to painting some of those same rooms. Like the last post on the hardwoods, I’m going to just lump the painting in together. In real time, the rooms were painted as we completed other projects in each space over the course of several months.

We previously discussed our paint color choices in an earlier post that you can read here. And here’s a discussion on painting the upstairs rooms, if you’d like to revisit that process!

Painting: Color Makes All The Difference

We wanted to have our cool color palette on full display in the foyer because it is a darker space with no exterior windows for natural lighting. We also wanted the foyer to be a little less serious. Enter our bright blues! While these 3 different coordinating blues would be used throughout the house, they are definitely most prominent in the foyer, both upstairs and down!

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The foyer is a perfect example of where we wanted to keep some of the “old” character but make the space feel current at the same time. The paint colors along with the very traditional staircase gave us the perfect combination of what we were shooting for in making our newer home feel much older.

Salmon Office = Sad Office

So both my office and Warren’s office are really interesting rooms because they form the very Queen Anne style turret that makes our home so distinctly “Victorian” from the curb. The original owners of the house decided that both rooms needed to be painted a bright salmon color however. They were, on the “bright” side, the only two rooms that were not completely wallpapered and for that, I was happy. They only had borders applied to them which were quite easy to remove.

The salmon had to go though, honestly. And so it went. Warren has a mix of greige and blue in his office (there’s a couple of pictures in this post) and I chose to go with the lightest blue in my space and I love it!

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Painting A Space Closer to a Kitchen!

Most of the kitchen would be painted later when the largest project of the renovation would be tackled. The breakfast nook was addressed sooner however. We were really wanting to move the microwave and our makeshift pantry into the nook to give us some sort of normal life resemblance. It’s amazing how just a little step closer to a real kitchen can make you happy when you’ve gone without one for too many months! Here we reinstalled the original beadboard and used the same colors as we did in the guest bedroom. With a greyish, greenish, blueish type of color combination; it will eventually match the adjoining sitting room and give some color to what will be a predominantly white kitchen.

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Dining Room Transformation

The dining room was a relatively easy fix, except for those darned painted stripes on the walls that made the wallpaper removal a bigger challenge. The dining room is another good example of our effort to keep the newer looking older. We chose to keep the fretwork above the window seat and the really ornate chandelier (not yet reinstalled) in the room. Like the other main living spaces in the house, we also chose to keep most of the room a neutral greige with just a pop of the medium blue in the window seat area. This has become a favorite place of mine to read and, on occasion, sneak in an afternoon nap!

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What on Earth?!

And then there was this…something icky in several of the window sills throughout the house. Most likely the residual mess of candles left burning in various windows! It was waxy, it was gross, and it wasn’t much fun to remove during the paint prep!

Next Time:

We’ll come back to the kitchen, sitting room, and living room later since those involve other projects. Next time we’ll talk about getting creative and making spaces work during a major renovation! Thanks for reading!

Blessings,
{Shelley}