Painting

For those of you who may not know our history with painting, let me say one word. Neutral.

Dan and I have been all about neutrals. The first house we moved into as married graduate students? White walls. It still had white walls when we left 5 years later.

Our second house, the one we own in Albuquerque? All the walls were varying shades of "Realtor Beige", except the kitchen which was white.

Now we have lived in this house for just over 7 years now. After a year, I convinced Dan to let me paint the 1/2 bath on the main floor. New color? Taupe. LOL. So when we found out we were expecting Claudia I began working on him concerning the nursery color.

I won. Claudia's nursery? Desert sage green. (It still is too, for those of you wondering. We have yet to upgrade her room from her pooh nursery. I fear it won't be too far off though. Claudia insisted on getting some purple paint chips the last couple of visits to Lowe's.)

So when it came time to paint Duncan's nursery, we even managed to go with 2 colors. Very pale light blue on top and a dark foresty green on the bottom.

I've been talking about painting the rest of the house since we painted Duncan's nursery, over 3 years ago. I finally decided to look at paint chips this summer. Found this great copper color that I thought would be good for the kitchen. Then found a nice canyon brown and little annie green. Now I was searching for a fourth color (four areas to the main floor: Living room, foyer, kitchen and dining room), namely a nice earthy purple or red, and was having difficulty. So I mentioned to Dan that I had been looking at paint and what did he think?

There are only 3 colors for our main floor, Dan wouldn't agree to any of the purple colors, and I couldn't find a red I liked to even show him. And none of the rooms are going to be the colors I originally envisioned.



But the main floor is getting painted. On to the next chapter of our painting tale.

So we finally agree on the colors for the walls (read: Cindy gave in), and off we go to Lowe's to pick up the paint. We get 5 gallons of paint: 2 burnished copper, 2 canyon, and 1 sweet annie green. The last gallon was the green, and the paint guy brought it over to me still unsealed. The conversation went something like this:

Paint guy: Uh, ma'am?
Me: Yep.
Paint guy: This color looks a little like split pea soup. Are you sure that is the color you're looking for?
Me: (Looking at the paint chip then at the split pea soup in the can) Um...yeah. That looks about right. (really hoping at this point that it will look better on the walls than it does in the paint can, because this color is going in the kitchen and dining room. Who wants to prep or eat food in a room that looks like split pea soup?)

Get it all home and we start in the kitchen and dining room. Once all is said and done, we are happy with the color on the walls, thank goodness. But we had quite a good laugh about the split pea soup comment. So Dan started on the living room today, just painting a corner so we could decide whether we wanted to keep the white ceilings with the bronze color, or paint the ceilings the canyon color. So I hear Dan say, "Ummm....Cindy? We went from split pea soup to pumpkin."

Now I'm thinking, there is no way that burnished copper looks like pumpkin. But sure enough the paint on the wall is looking too orange. Once the paint dried I liked it better, but who knew it would look like pumpkin straight out of the can?

So our experiment in color is turning out nicely. The living room is about 3/4 of the way finished.

Oh, and if you're visiting us? Please don't tell me that our house looks like pumpkin and split pea soup.

Love,
Cindy