When your painting party fails...

Over the course of restoring Isthmus House, lots of people have offered help. Some wanted to put a sledgehammer through my walls (haha, no), some helped in the yard, and some offered to help with whatever might come up.

Based on that last one, The Roommate and I scheduled a painting party with our friends.

A few weeks prior, I also hosted a priming party with friends where the drywall took on a much more finished look from last week's raw state!

After the primer was complete, well, let's just say having a painting party - even with free food - isn't terribly successful on Labor Day.

Following that particular bump, I brought in pros to paint better and faster than I possibly could.

On their first day in, they tackled the stairwell and foyer, going so far as to fill in a hole left by my electrician when I asked for a fixture to move slightly to one side and a few nicks left from the initial drywall.

A new bump, it turned out I only had one gallon of paint in the color I'd chosen for the stairwell. No idea how that happened, but it turned out to be kind of a happy accident.

You see, when I figured out that I didn't have enough paint to fill my stairwell (I need about a gallon and a half because of the vault), I opened it to determine if I could add white to it and make it work with the other colors... and was promptly shocked that my nice light sage green I'd selected was this color:

The color my mother dubbed Dirty Olive. It was awful and nothing like the one I'd chosen... or thought I had.

Over the next 20 minutes, I feverishly added white (same sheen, same brand) to make a new color and then another new color:

And another:

And one more...

Before finally landing on a color I could live with.

About a minute later (really, I was stirring the last batch when my painter said he needed it), the paint was going up:

The crew was super fast and gave me a roll of tape to mark any touch ups I saw and wanted them to finish when they came back.

I did what they said:

I ended up with up with about a hundred little pieces of tape on my wall - resulting a sigh and a shake of a head before getting started on the last coat by my painter.

It's hard to believe that we started out with this: 

The foyer turned out beautifully, with lighting that's classic to the house, original trim and not Dirty Olive walls.

That little bit of white to the right is actually just a still-wet touch up, but I love this photo!

I'm going to call that a win.