Why Painting Your House Twice (in the same weekend) is the Way to Go//After Pictures of Our Front Room

(thanks for all the sweet words about my living room–it makes me feel more comfortable posting more pictures! and for now, the orange and white foot stool will stay the same–I think I just needed to hear it from you, and you guys were great with the feedback!)

So, the grey…

When we painted our kitchen three years ago, we bought like 15 samples of grey and painted them all over the place. Grey has this uncanny way of looking blue or brown or purple or white, depending on the lighting, and as soon as we thought we’d found one, then the light would change and the grey would change and I’d be all a mess again deciding on the right color. So we settled on Behr Premium paint, Cathedral Grey (it might be “gray,” I have this weird love for using old fashioned spellings), and we love it.

And when we decided that the rest of the main areas needed to be grey too, just a lighter grey, I tried some of the samples we had from the kitchen, and bought three new ones. And none of them worked, for the same reasons mentioned above. So I decided to have the paint guys make a sample of the Cathedral Grey at 50%, and it was perfect! So it’s the same tones as our kitchen but just 50% lighter.

The funny (not so funny) part of the story is what happened when we actually put our hands to the paint brushes and starting coating the walls with all our mights. I bought one gallon of the specially mixed paint and we got to work on the living room with the first coat, then headed to the front room. We confirmed that we loved the color, so Luke headed to Home Depot with a picture of the can lid so they could exactly match the color, and came home with 3 gallons in hand.

The night continued on- I rolled and rolled (not on my belly, just with a paint roller), and he cut in the edges (I’m terrible at that job). The kids went to bed and we carried on. Near midnight we were taking a break, and I kept asking Luke if he was sure he had come behind me and cut in the corners, and he was sure of it, but it just wasn’t drying right. And we joked about them not giving us the right color, haha, couldn’t be…but then we stared at each other with pale faces, went to the lids on the paint, and indeed, they gave us the full color Cathedral Grey, not altered at all, which is way too dark for an entire house.

That was not the best way to end 6 hours of painting with all of our hearts and thinking we’d be hanging out at the pool all day the next day because we had made so much progress. Oh. My. Goodness. So we went to bed tired, sore, and dejected.

Saturday morning came–we went to breakfast, then to Home Depot with paint cans in hand, and we agreed ahead that I would do the talking (both Luke and I know that I am better at these types of things, I have no idea why–but it’s probably because he’s just way too nice). So I explained to them that they did not do as we had asked, that the paint was all wrong, that now we will have to have 4 coats of paint on our walls and that both our money and our time had been wasted, because we had to basically paint our whole house again. They were nice enough and agreed that they hadn’t given us the right color, although there was some definite blame on the computer thrown in there (people like to blame things on systems). But they redeemed themselves in the end, because the moral of the story is…

They refunded all of our money and gave us all 4 gallons of the right color paint for free.

So yes, we had to spend the rest of the day painting, and yes, I crumbled in the middle of it with a muscle cramp in my side (after 8 hours of rolling walls) that sent me to bed for an hour with a heating pad (nothing like making this mom NOT feel young anymore), but after it was all said and done, we got two rooms and two halls painted for the price of one gallon of paint (the initial first one I had bought which I didn’t keep my receipt for) and plenty leftover paint to finish the upstairs.

I guess every project has to come with a story…
And now for the photos of the front room redo…we are loving this new space (it has been so many random things throughout the years–mostly a school room, sometimes a dining room, always a play room, and sometimes just an “I can’t figure out this space” room. Little did I know all it needed was a couch and some curtains to help define it.)

(This room is sort of becoming the guest room, and it’s my children’s new favorite room!)
This gallery wall is such a potluck, but I’m actually pleased with how it turned out. The only things I bought full price were the three frames on the right, which were so cheap anyway, because mostly they’re plastic on the back. I found the “&” sign at Tuesday Morning a while back, 80% off (it’s sort of scratched but no one can notice it). I repainted some frames and repainted the “N” which I cut out of a cork tile last year. The kids did some really cool art at school last year (one more benefit to having actual art teachers at an actual school) which is what all the paintings are, and the cityscape of San Antonio is a print I ordered from Society6, along with the quote pillows (most of the other pillows I made) . The family photo was something I had custom made by an artist on etsy for Luke last Christmas. I painted some of the art myself, and the little magnetic board on the side wall is an antique tray I found a couple of years ago at an antique store. The little antique numbers were the house numbers from our first house in North Carolina, a momento to a sweet time in our lives. I still want something 3 dimensional for the oval blue frame, but everyone seems to be doing antlers these days and I’m determined to find something different, so until then it’ll have to be left blank. 

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  • The room looks great! Love the color. And what a great testimony for Home Depot! I actually had the exact same thing happen last year in my living room. I had run out of paint with only the area 1′ away from the ceiling on two walls left to cover, so I went back to Lowe’s the next day and had 2x 1 quart cans color matched to finish the job. I was so pumped to wrap up work on the room that afternoon- only to have it dry the wrong color and I had to do both walls all over again! The worst part was the customer service was not nearly as good. The woman at the desk was like, “You want a refund? But you used a whole can of paint and opened this one, too…” And I was getting so mad, beet red in the face, about to start yelling- “NO KIDDING, LADY! And now my living room is jacked up because of it, too!” After she finally got her manager out and the manager called in the guy from the paint department, the paint guy took a dab of the paint from the can and put it on the paint chip and he was like, “Yep, that’s the wrong color.” Ooooh, I was insulted. And 6 months pregnant, so that didn’t help things. Haha!

    • Oh not, that’s terrible too! Truly, home projects can be oh soooo frustrating while you’re in the midst of it. Maybe that’s why it takes us so long to actually finish stuff!