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Painting the Living Room

Carey and I spent most of today painting our living room. Prior, it was white with a "library" border around the top - a bunch of books on a "shelf." Ick. We decided to paint the walls a light tan with an "accent wall" in a darker brown near Carey's desk. The room is rather large - 40' x 20' or larger - so we didn't want too much color to shrink the room.

When we removed the border, we found that the builders and prior owners hadn't painted (in a flat white paint) the entire wall. The top 10 inches - under the border - was just primed drywall. After the first coat of paint, the line was still visible. I laid it on quite thick the second time around, and unless you know exactly where to look and catch the exact light needed, the line is invisible. Still, we took no chances on the accent wall and added another coat of primer.

Primer also has a nifty way of removing several spackle marks left by the previous owner's over-zealous picture-hanging habits. These spots, when painted with even a satin paint, showed up quite differently when the light hit them. A single coat of primer, a coat of paint, and you can barely see the spots at all.

In the end, the accent wall is more of a lisp, because the color wasn't nearly dark enough to really offset the lighter tan. We ended up buying new curtains, replacing the original (and hideous) magenta vertical blinds. I hung the iron-like rods and the curtains this morning. They're gorgeous, thick, and will be just a tad cumbersome when we want to shove them aside to let light in, but well worth the trouble given what we had before.

The colors don't really appear very well here, but at least you can see the curtains:

Living Room Paint Job

One Response to "Painting the Living Room"

  1. Hey. I remember that living room. I like the paint job.