Let There be White

Covering all that dreary beige took us two + coats. This shouldn’t come as a surprise but man, it was a lot of work.

“Before”

First, I got down and scooted around on my butt for the better part of Friday cutting in around all the baseboards. Then I cut in around all the windows, then I cut in around all the doors. You get the picture. The problem with doing that is that by using a brush, the paint goes on much thinner and by the time the weekend was over I think I had cut in three times. As you can imagine, I was extremely sore from crouching, standing, getting up on a chair, stretching, etc. Over and over. Doug was in charge of rolling, which is usually the easy job except that since the ceilings are arched–and the same sad, lifeless shade of beige–he had to roll the ceilings too. Which meant leaning back and stretching in funny ways.

White walls and ceiling

It even made the extremely questionable ceiling fan look OK. (That, and cleaning it thoroughly)

Saturday was a sad, sad day for us (mostly me) with sore muscles, but we kept on truckin’ and between Saturday (twelve intense hours), Sunday, and Monday we got all the painting done. Well, except for the window trim and baseboards. Yes, we plan on tackling that depressing task, but the house was just so grimy and dirty that no measure of cleaning would make it look new and pristine.

I’m excited for white. I never, ever thought that when given free-reign as far as colors are concerned, I would pick a non-color. But, after reflection I realized that all of my favorite rooms from pinterest had backdrops of white walls which featured colorful and eclectic furnishings. The white helps keep things light and lets the focus be drawn to the rest of the room.

I’m on the fence about the bamboo roman blinds (you can see them in the first picture in this post). I sort of hate them, but sort of think they could be worked in could eventually be a nice natural element in the room. We’ll see what they look like once we get curtains up (high and wide, natch). Another problem about them is that when pulling the cord to raise them they get hooked on the window latch and I’m nervous about breaking them. Only time will tell…..

Oh, and also: most annoying pup award goes to this little guy. He is such a social animal that being out in the backyard (on a tether since the fence is questionable at best) by himself was tantamount to torture. He whined, whined, and whined the whole time,only letting up when someone went out to pet him. Let’s just say that after enough was enough he was taken home to the apartment to nap in his kennel. I hope the neighbors don’t hate us already because of our nuisance of a pooch. He’s normally an indoor dog! I promise! Luckily, most of the houses on this street seem to have dogs. So, they should be understanding. I hope.

What did you do over Labor Day? I hope it wasn’t as strenuous as mine.