Sunday, June 8, 2014

When Good Paint Color Intentions Go Bad, and then Good Again

Happy Sunday Everyone! It has been a busy couple of weeks around here, but we are making progress. Mark is still hard at work on Our 2014 OutDoor Project. On top of that I decided to paint the kitchen and one wall in our living room. We are also getting ready for a garage sale in a couple of weeks. We have been visiting with family and friends, doing family bike rides, going on walks, and I made my first pie ever from scratch! Ashlyn was a big helper when it came to making the pie. She loves to help in the kitchen, so this is Ashlyn's first pie also. Sorry to tease, but this post isn't about pie.
Our first pie from scratch! Now I have to figure out how to make it healthier.
Today I want to share some wisdom with you that I have learn recently. I am sure all seasoned DIYers (yeah, that is probably not a word, but I am going with it) have already learned this lesson, but we are not seasoned at all. We are newbie DIYers and are learning lessons all of the time. This has to do with paint colors and learning from your mistakes.
Before Color
Before, getting ready to paint. This mess drove us crazy for days.
Another before

We are new at painting and choosing paint colors. We received advise from my parents to go with Sherwin Williams Paint. Their paint is fantastic and we loved painting Ashlyn's room with it, so we went ahead and decided that we would use that for the rest of the house as well. That narrowed it down to the paint colors that they carried. I knew I wanted to do green in the kitchen, since we will be painting our kitchen cabinets white and carry that color over to one wall in our living room.

I went and picked a green color that I liked and then made my biggest mistake. I went ahead and just bought 2 gallons of the paint. I was off and running to complete a big painting project. I say big because I knew I was doing this by myself and in the kitchen there are all sorts of different angles. I removed everything from the walls and on top of the cupboards. I moved all of the furniture away from the walls and started taping away. I know I am new, but I am a huge advocate of taping. My paint brush skills are definitely lacking and the tape makes this very forgiving.

After taping I primed. Once I finished priming I was very optimistic, it was starting to look a lot better. I then opened the can of paint and started stirring. At that point I was questioning my decision and I felt worse when Ashlyn came over and asked me why I was going to paint yellow. UH-OH! I still stayed optimistic and put it on the wall anyway. I then started to get an even bigger knot in my stomach when I looked at Mark's face. I told him to just wait until it drys, but at that point I kinda knew it would be terrible, but I just kept painting on. Big Mistake! Huge! (anyone get that Pretty Woman reference?)
BLEH color. It actually looked a lot worse in person.
Again it looked a lot worse in person.

I finished the kitchen and moved onto the wall connecting our living room and dining room. After 3 hours of painting I was finally done with one coat. I looked back at the wall where I had started and wanted to vomit. It reminded me of what I would find in Ashlyn's diapers when I was breastfeeding her. That yellowish green color, sorry that was probably too much info. I was defeated at that moment. I knew I had made a really bad decision.
Yellowish Green, not the look I was going for.

I felt like I had wasted a lot of time and money. I then decided that it was too late now and decided that we just needed to move on. Mark asked me to cover it up as soon as possible, so that is what I did. The next day I covered it back up with primer until we could find a better color. 

This is where I smartened up a bit. I went and looked for different color options. When we decided on a few colors I went and bought samples. I put them up on the wall and then we made our decision from there. I know this is not a new concept, but let me tell you samples are amazing! We knew right away that one of the colors would not work, so that narrowed our decision. If I would have bought those colors in gallons I cannot tell you how much money I would have spent. The samples saved us time and money.
Samples on the wall are amazing!
Once we chose our new colors I primed back over the samples I put on the wall and away I went. I love my new colors. They are exactly what I was looking for. We still have a lot of painting to do, my living room is 4 different colors right now, but I need a little painting break. We will very soon be covering up the two other colors in the living room with gray, but that will come in time. 
 More of what I was looking for. It will look even better when we paint the cabinets white.
A sage green in the kitchen.
Grey on the wall that connects our living and dining rooms.
I have learned a valuable lessons in this process. I learned that in large doses I do not like a yellowish green color, I do still like it in small doses like on a picture frame. I learned that if you don't like the color right away quit painting and let it dry before making your decision. Seriously don't keep painting the whole room plus some if you don't like it. I learned that samples really help the color decision making process. I learned that my house will be a disaster area, we are talking Hoarder house, until I am done painting. Finally I learned that this wasn't as big of a mistake as I thought because it taught me a lot of good lessons.

It is all better now. Oh, and pie really does help the learning process.
Hopefully I will be bringing you a pie recipe very soon.

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