House Stories Part II

Today I will return to the theme of "What a difference a can of paint can make." Or in this case about six cans. In one room.

When we bought the house we knew several of the interior rooms were due for a change. The bathroom was the worst, and the laundry room was bad, but there were two rooms with mainly cosmetic problems. The first was what you may think of as the guest bedroom, or the second bedroom (or someday off in the misty future the kid bedroom, but not any time soon). We've been referring to it as the "Green Room," and these pictures will show you why. First, the before pic:


Damn. That, that is a color, right there. And not a good one. Who in the hell paints a room canary yellow with a royal blue chair rail? Did you notice that even the floor register in the lower left corner (not actually connected to any ductwork or any actual central climate control system) is yellow? What where they thinking? And there is no baseboard in this room. At all.

From hundreds of miles away, we could see that paint job; it kept us awake at night. We picked out some colors and sent the paint chips up to our housepainter (Mike Henderson, highly recommended) and said, "Go. Make it better." And so he did.

Evidently he used six cans of paint in that room because the yellow kept showing through. Dang.

Then there was the living room. In this house, when you walk in the front door, the first room you enter is the living room. First, the pano:

And next, a shot of the fireplace area:
I would like to point out here the lack of any crown moulding, the spiderweb between the fireplace and the door (that door goes out to the side porch, which you saw in exterior shots in the previous post), and the lovely stains on the carpet. Lots of stains on this carpet; this room wasn't the worst. You can see the beautiful canary yellow room through that door there, and the blue room behind is the dining room. We didn't care for the paint color here, which I would describe as somewhere between "Damp Sand" and "Dead Body." It made the whole room lifeless...

And now, for the after shots. The new color, best seen in this photo, is "Ripe Wheat." I like that name better than "Dead Body." Note also the new crown moulding, and the repainted door (I don't miss the three mysterious brown spots).

Here is a picture of the fireplace. The mantle block was repainted, too, which is nice, and all the trim around the doors and windows. They did a very nice job and, but for the still-crappy carpet, the room seems nice and new. This picture doesn't do the paint color justice, but there are more pictures for later down the road.