We're on a painting roll...

Things are rolling at Isthmus House these days. Some days, it feels more like they're about to roll over me but mostly it's just progress.

We left off last week with one beautiful foyer and stairwell. At least looking up when you walk in my house is nice! The stairwell has gotten a little beat up the last couple of weeks with demo upstairs (hmmm, guess that's a story for another time) and contractors coming up and down the stairs. It's okay though; we'll fix it because that's what we do!

Two weeks ago we talked about drywall downstairs on the walls that had lost a lot of the plaster and didn't have any trim on them. My general rule of thumb for choosing which walls were drywalled and which weren't was the presence of trim (there's trim? let's get plasterin') and the amount of damage to the plaster (uhhh, it's hanging off the wall, there are no keys and the lath is broken... that might be a problem - although not an insurmountable one).

The moral of this story is that the downstairs of Isthmus House ended up with a pretty decent sprinkling of old plaster walls with new drywall.

One of these walls is plaster and one is drywall - can you tell the difference?

Once all of it was done, the walls primed and the foyer and stairwell painted (which required things like scaffolding on stairs) it was time to start on the downstairs paint.

As it turned out, almost all of the paint I'd purchased a while back looked waaaaaaaaay different (I think it changed) now. Grey was mauve, sage was dirty olive, it was just bad.

And so we went back to the drawing board and found new colors - half of which I mixed myself because, well, I'm picky! I learned (for once, the easy way!) that it's best to stay in the same sheen and brand and to always use really high quality paint for any project.

Fortunately, my painters were able to work with my eventual choices.

I like light, non-pastel colors and it's incredible how light and bright the rooms look and feel now with them on the walls.

We're down to just baseboards, casings and trim paint now but it's a wonderful change already.

Check out our before and afters - what do you think?

Original Living Room Paint

New Living Room Paint

Old Dining Room

Now you can actually see the trim!

We still don't know what to call this color...

New study!