The Paint Fairies Strike 2

I mentioned our goal to have our front living room/foyer/stair/hallway painted by the end of February in my 2010 Action Plans post, and after quickly knocking out a much smaller scale painting project in early January, Justin and I kept the momentum going and painted our massive 2-story space the weekend following our vacation in Hawaii. I tell ya, there's never a moment spared in our house!

To give you a taste of what we were facing, just take a look at these pictures.

(Justin demonstrating how he is going to reach the ceiling.)

Do you have a guess of how much paint we had to purchase? How does 10 gallons sound? Yes, it was a kick in the coin purse, but after receiving numerous professional painting quotes that surpassed $1000 I was quite relieved when the cashier at Home Depot told me the total was $360. On top of the savings we were already receiving by doing it ourselves, I bought the paint during the Behr $5 off per gallon rebate time so I knew I was going to get $50 back. Bonus!

Once again, as you can see (or maybe not), we sprung for Behr's Premium Plus paint ($33 per gallon). Seeing as that this is the first room our guests see when they enter our abode, we wanted to make sure that in two coats the color would be even and look like a professional did it. (Can you imagine painting this darn room three times?!)

After the big and drawn-out debate on how many colors we should use and what the colors should be, we decided on painting half of the room one color and the other half another. We really wanted the stairway to be a "wowsah" focal point, so we chose Behr's Melted Chocolate, which is a medium brown color. Melted Chocolate is a tad lighter than what I envisioned, but what made us choose this one over the other options was that at night, this one still looked brown and the others were tipping on the edge of black, not what we were going for. The lighter color we selected is actually Sherwin William's Mexican Sand but since Home Depot has the wonderful technology of color matching, we were able to get this color in the same paint as Melted Chocolate. Mexican Sand has a cooler undertone that I normally do not favor, but this room gets so much light during the day, the sun's rays warm it up.

Tip: Taping the paint chips on the wall and looking at them at different times throughout the day was very important during our selection process. If we hadn't done this, we would have ended up with a black stairway and a rosy-colored room.

Here is a mock-up of the paint colors we selected.

Before we could get down to business, we had to move all of our things out and into a safe spot. So, this is how our dining room looked--a little more crammed than it usually is.

In order to reach all the way up the walls, Justin borrowed some painting tools from his dad that squashed my skepticism and worked extremely well. He got an extension pole and ceiling and trim edger. He also bought an attachment for the pole that held a paint brush, which he used to do the corners of the walls.

Here he is, high flying painting

And now that I have completely bored you to death with the play-by-play, here are the photos you've been waiting for, our freshly painted living room/foyer/stair/hallway.

What do you think? Did we make the right color choices? Would you have chosen differently?

I've got a few more upcoming projects for this space up my sleeve (some that I'm even tackling this weekend) so make sure you come back and check often.