Think Green

I have always heard that when you are trying to choose a paint color, to go look in your closet and see what colors you have there. That is a good indicator of colors you like. Here's what I found in my closet:

Cole Haan Janell slippers (my favorite Nike employee store purchase ever), A new green jacket,

and this sweater. So we decided to paint our great room a shade of olive green, a little darker than these items, but the same basic color. It was a big step away from the light-yellowish-neural color that all of our walls were painted when we built our house 6 1/2 years ago. Back then I didn't know how to diversify our palette. I didn't really care, either because we had no furniture that matched.

Our great room has 19-foot ceilings. It's a big room, and it was a big job to paint. The hardest part was masking off the crown molding, and also taking down the can lights way, way up there. Fortunately, Mark is a pro on ladders. We had to buy a 16-ft step ladder to add to our ladder collection, but that was much cheaper than paying someone else to do our paint job.

I'm exhausted, though. Mark got home from work Thursday around 5:00. We jumped right in masking things off. We stayed up until around 2:00, and still hadn't opened a paint bucket. We started painting Friday at 8:00 am with the ceiling, and moved on to the 2 walls being painted green, and finished Saturday morning around 4:30. We slept for a few hours, and started up again around 10:00 on Saturday, this time moving to the 2 big walls being painted a taupe-ish-brown color, working until past midnight. But it is done (except for a few touch-ups around the doors), and it looks amazing. I never thought I would be brave enough to go for such a dark, bold color, but I'm so glad we did. It makes me excited to try out some crazy colors when we paint the basement. I'm mostly excited that the ceilings are only 9-ft high down there. That's going to be a snap.