Painting!!!

When we got into our house the walls were a boring, bland white. It had no life, no style, and more than that, it was dirty! The walls were painted without a gloss to it so anything on the walls couldn't really be wiped off without leaving a scrubby mark on the paint.

To fix it, we chose a light satin gloss Valspar paint in a sandy color. To make sure our whole house wasn't super boring we chose to accent a few walls here and there with a slightly darker sandy paint.

Prior to us moving out here and buying our first home, we had saved up a pretty penny so that we could make any house out here our home. We thought that we had saved up enough to to most (if not all) of the upgrades we wanted but it quickly became quite clear to us that these things were not as inexpensive as we had budgeted for. The first slap in the face came with the paint.

We chose Valspar paint because the helper bee working at the paint station had mentioned that you would only need to use one coat of paint and that one gallon should cover about 400 square feet. HA! We had to purchase twice as much paint because not only did it require at least two coats but one gallon did not go as far as the retailer had suggested! No big deal.... we bought a lot of paint. We were just disappointed that our savings was taking it's first big hit.

Prepping the house for painting wasn't as extensive as most other painting projects either. We didn't have to throw down the plastic tarp to protect the carpet because it was the next thing to get ripped out- and why waste the extra time and expense to protect something that's being tossed anyway, right? We just had to take down the window treatments (something else we're debating upgrading in the future) and tape off the molding, light switches, and outlets.It took me about a week to paint the whole house. It was exhausting! Thomas helped me with some of the prep work but his main job was working on the outside of the house. He hates painting and I hate yardwork- we thought it was a fair deal.

I don't know if I'll ever paint an entire house myself again! Ideally I would only paint one room at a time but with an empty house we needed to take advantage!

(Above is a "before" picture of our living room built-ins and the "after")

More posts to come on our continued home improvement projects!