One of the most satisfying parts of the renovation process is putting new paint color on the walls. It has a huge impact without (too) much work and when combined with new carpeting, creates the feeling of a brand new – fresh and clean room.
Before we headed to Spain to take care of our family, we ordered new carpets for the three smaller bedrooms of the house. We had a goal of at least priming the walls but the ambition to have them all painted before the new carpet went in. We just knew it would be easier to paint without much worry with only the sub-floor to deal with.
Earlier this year I began collecting paint chips from Home Depot, Ace, and Lowe’s – then each time we went back I would take another peek just in case something caught my eye. One of the themes we want to weave into our decor is Americana – muted colors of blue, white, taupe and perhaps a red accent here and there to honor being close to baseball town. For the bedrooms we chose a light taupe that will be paired with a dusty navy blue for the doors and trim.
We have many walls to paint in this house and each room has the potential for a new theme or color palette. To try and avoid too much chaos, we decided to keep the 3 smaller bedrooms the same color palette and we’ll do something a bit more unique for the primary bedroom a little more geared toward nature. This means we needed a lot of wall paint – and primer too! We headed on over to Home Depot and ordered ourselves a 5 gallon bucket of paint while crossing our fingers we were confident in our color choice.
Of course, before we could put up the new color, we had to spend the time to prep and make sure the walls were in good condition to accept the paint. This meant lots of scrubbing, patching, sanding, and so on plus removing the baseboard heaters to get them out of the way (because that is the right way to do it!). One bedroom was particularly bad and took several sessions of scraping, patching, sanding, patching again, sanding, again, and so on before it was ready to be primed – ugh! With as much effort we put into this, we found ourselves with a bit more repair in some areas even after painting the final color due to how rough some of the spots were.
With the two of us working together, often one of us edging and the other rolling, we made swift work and got all three bedrooms painted top to bottom in about 2 weeks, finishing just a couple of days before the carpets were installed – mission accomplished!
Check out more process photos here.
