It’s barely above zero outside and hubby has been spending all his time inside driving me crazy! So I convinced him to start our easiest projects, painting the living room and dining room and ‘parlor’ better known as the new spare bedroom. Those rooms all need really minimal repairs before paint and the dining room is empty right now (at least until early March when he gets a pool table for his birthday) so it’s perfect timing and relatively inexpensive to make this easy.
The dining room has an embossed wall paper on the top 1/2 of the room above the chair rail that I want to preserve, but it wasn’t in the best of condition. Then again, it wasn’t in the worst shape either. I decided to try and paint it (I’d heard that this doesn’t always work well). This paper is fortunately one of those that works. It’s turning out better than I thought.
As you can see, I have been ‘trying’ out some colors. What? We’re going to paint anyway. I just wanted to live with it for a few days first.
We’re using BEHR paint and are going with shades of a creamy, milky cocoa aka Oklahoma Wheat for the walls and an off white aka Innocence for the wall paper and oak wood tone Golden Burmese for the mantle. I’m not sure why the mantle was painted in the first place, (I’m not going to strip it), but it really fits with the character of this old house so we want to make it warmer (no pun intended). It’s a ‘double’ mantle with a beveled mirror and dimpled support posts for the upper mantle shelf. The original tiles under the mantles and around the fireplace are a khaki gold variegated mix that we are trying to preserve and accentuate. The wood stains used on all the baseboards, doors and windows are ALL DIFFERENT, so we’re trying to coordinate with all of them since they don’t need doing. These are the colors we picked here on the computer, but we’ll see if in the store tomorrow they look the way we imagine they will in our house. I just don’t want to end up feeling like we live in a cave with the 9 foot ceilings.
These are obviously the before pictures. I’ll post some more before and after pictures. Cross your fingers, if all goes well, we’ll have a new living room by Super bowl!