making a house a home: PAINT

Oh, these walls. We have been patching/sanding/patching and sanding again/painting these walls for weeks and weeks and we are so close to being done (with the upstairs at least)! Close enough that I want to share the before/afters of the hallway and bedrooms with you. I swear these poor walls never got a hole patched in 50 years, and although we didn't count there had to be hundreds of them. On top of that there were some pretty horrible paint jobs that needed to be scraped and skimmed over with mud. And then, once all of the prepping was finally done we rolled a coat of primer and 2 coats of paint - Benjamin Moore Marscapone to be exact. I wanted to brighten up the place with (almost) white walls everywhere. It looks so fresh and clean!

(We haven't had time to take all of the tape down yet, sorry it's a bit of an eyesore)

The hallway was painted a beige color. The before is a bit blurry, but I'm glad that I could find one. In the after you'll notice we also ripped up the Pergo flooring and the door frame around the first door on the left. It is the bathroom door and we are fixing it to match the height/style of the rest of the doors (why is it different - who knows?!) so, yes, we will have some more patching/painting to do once that is done.

The girls will continue to share a room when we move since I know it will help with the transition, and they love being together. They are starting to ask to sleep next to each other. Just last night as LM was hugging Lark on her bed she said, "I love my sweet Larkie. I want her to sleep next to me." I promised them they can sleep next to each other when Lark is a little bit older. It is too cute to see their love growing. Anyway, their room was a light yellowish-tan. LM was disappointed I didn't choose to paint their room pink, but I told her we could paint the closet pink as a compromise :)

The master bedroom is one of the more dramatic changes. I don't even know what to say about this brown gold-faux thing going on. It was even worse when we realized it was covering up a grid pattern underneath (see the bottom left corner?). We had to scrape the whole gooey wall down and then sand like crazy to get rid of the grid pattern. We were so happy when we covered up this mess!

A fun discovery happened when took the door hinges off to freshen up the door jams. The original colors that were painted in the master and the girl's room way back in 1958 were hidden underneath! The master was originally a pretty aqua blue, and the girl's room was a peachy-orange. I left the colors there in homage - I love these little connections to the past.

The third bedroom will be the playroom for now (eventually the nursery). It was a dark army green and had a peeling chalkboard on one wall...but, you would never know it now! We also got rid of the swamp cooler in the window.

It's like a breath of fresh air! Next on the long list of to-do's we need to lay tile in the kitchen and down the hallway (where we ripped out the Pergo). We are also waiting on kitchen counter tops and then we will tile a back splash too. I have to think only a few steps ahead or it all becomes too overwhelming. We got ourselves into a lot of work, but it has been satisfying work!