Hopefully there won't be too many "Part"s to this room, but, there may. We have already hit a pretty big speed bump breaking just painting into two parts.
Let's start at the beginning. Once we knew what kind of color we wanted for the front room, we started trying to develop the exact shade we wanted. Dan mixed the two samples together at different ratios and painted it both on the wall and a scrap of dry wall.
We ended up with the second lightest shade. We've learned the hard way that colors always look darker once a whole room is that color, we played it safe. Since we mixed it, we get to name it, and it's called "Sea Glass Storm". Dan calls it gray. I call it green. Either way, it's gorgeous.
A trip to Home Depot and three gallons of paint later, we dove in. First, we painted the ceiling. Polar Bear like all the other ceilings in the house. Here's what it looked like before:
And after:
It always feels so much better once we've started painting a room. It's so much cleaner and prettier with just that small change.
Then, we painted one wall at a time. Starting with the largest, least-edging wall, we made really good time of it.
Since the rest of the room didn't actually have too much painting surface (once you subtract out the fireplace, the window, and the doorway), we decided to paint the remaining walls in one go. It was going to be awesome.
Then, bum bum BUM! Disaster struck! While taping off the ceiling, Dan found evidence of termites. TERMITES! Every Arizona home owner's worst nightmare.
Downside: we have termites. Upside: we were already working on the room so anything necessary to kill all the damn little bugs won't wreck all our work. If they need to punch a hole in the wall to fill it with poison, no problem! And all the baseboards were already removed, so if they need to get at the foundation, easy access!
Because it looked pretty isolated to one corner of the room, we just painted the other walls.
We'll finally get to finish up the walls once Terminix shows up and does their job. [Sidenote: God, I hate Terminix. Before we purchased the house, we had a separate inspection just for termites and they actually missed the termites. Dan actually found termite damage days before we were supposed to sign all the papers. The former owners were then required to tent the house, which, in turn, almost pushed back our move-in date. All of this during monsoon season, so the tent actually BLEW OFF THE HOUSE at one point. Word to the wise: don't trust Terminix. Learn how to spot termites in your own home. We basically use them as termite insurance.]
But, on the bright side, we did finally agree on a ceiling fan! I doubt we've debating anything as much as we've debated this fan. We debated number of blades, size, type of light fixture, metal color, blade color, you name it. I went back and forth on how I wanted the room to feel. Eventually, the best way to describe what I was looking for was a ceiling fan that you would have found in Indiana Jones' study. I wanted it to be classic and vintage. Dan was insistent that it be five blades. I needed an enclosed light fixture, but it still needed to be very bright. Dan needed it to be big and for the light bulbs to be straight-forward. This is the fan we walked into Lowes and instantly fell in love with it.
It's the Saratoga fan. It's oil rubbed bronze with deep cherry blades and a bright light kit. We love it. It's bright and quiet and just awesome.
So far so good. Next on the plan is to hopefully finish up the walls soon. After the termites are treated, there's some drywall that needs to be placed, but after that, painting should go really quickly. From there, tiling the base of the fireplace, tiling the fireplace itself, and building a new mantel! That's going to be a lot of hard decisions and hard work, but there's no way it won't be beautiful!
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