Painting the Family Room (again)!

Heyyyy! We’re back with the update from Friday’s post… it’s PAINTING DAY! It has been a loooooooong time since we’ve proverbially set foot in the family room around here. And I think we’re past due… but first, let’s catch ourselves back up to speed. The last time we “visited”, it looked like this:

Bright and peppy, yes. Completely monochromatic, DOUBLE YES. For the longest time, we felt like the room was missing something, but couldn’t quite figure out what. We loved the shape and feel of the furniture, but didn’t love the color or pattern (although we didn’t have any say in the matter). We loved how the light from the window bounced off the mirrors, but the wall color wasn’t doing it for us anymore. After awhile of playing the “what’s wrong with this picture?” game, we realized: everything in this room is the SAME COLOR. Walls, furniture, carpet, everything- tan/beige/light yellowish. Everything was the same, which meant that nothing stood out. So, we decided to paint.Last week I promised to show you what the room now looks like, but first let’s start with the basics. After much deliberation, we chose the color “Cumulus” by Behr. I really wanted something gray, but gray did not go with our furniture. However, the blues really complimented the furniture, so we settled somewhere in the neighborhood of a blue-gray to try and get the best of both worlds. It took a long time to land on the right color and my number one tip to any room-painting scenario is to buy a test pot of your top three or four and paint large-ish samples on the wall. Leave them up for a few days and be sure to look at them in every type of light and at different times of the day. This definitely helped us and as it turns out, the one we thought would be the winner ended up being WAAAAYYYY too blue in larger quanitities. Thankfully, our test “swatches” on the wall helped us to determine that before pulling the trigger and painting the entire room that color before realizing the mistake we had made. In the end, Cumulus stole our hearts and has been great in the space (I believe it is the second in from the right in the picture above). As for where we painted, this color went up in the family room, the staircase, and the upstairs hall. Alright, enough chatter. You just want to see the pictures, I know. 🙂 Here we go…

This is the Upstairs Hall in the very beginning stages:

And further along (you can see the blue everywhere except that little sliver of yellow going down the steps):And all finished! We were immediately thrilled at how light, airy, and clean it felt.And as for downstairs, you already saw it in mid-progress:Here’s the finished product:

We like that the room no longer feels like one big yellow blob. Actually, we even like the furniture better now that it stands out against the new color!

It’s also fun to see the view looking into the kitchen… before it just looked like a continuation of a similar color, but it’s nice to have a more defined space. In some pictures, the color translates as really blue, but the photo below is a good representation of the gray “cloudy” quality it has to it.Ah, so fresh and so clean! This room has gone from “eh” to one of our favorites in the whole house… can’t wait to keep the ball rolling on some more updates we have in store for it! Alas, this is where I leave you for today friends. Have a great rest of your week!

PS. Check back in tomorrow for the second of three Thanksgiving table settings… plus another VIDEO! 🙂