Confession- fixing up your house whilst also running a business and managing a personal life is a lot. It doesn’t leave much down time for fun side hobbies, say blogging, and when time does free up binging Netflix on the sofa becomes incredibly appealing.

That being said, I just returned from a much needed vacation and am feeling like the air around me is a bit lighter. With that, I craved getting back to finding time for hobbies, i.e. reading and blogging. Check on the former ✔️ And working on checking the latter!

So. I am working on fixing up my house. An ongoing project that has seemed to consume a lot of my time, money, and brain space. I have to say that a lot of the time it feels overwhelming and leaves me questioning what David and I got ourselves into. But lately, even though there is so much (SO MUCH) left to be done, I feel really proud of what we have accomplished thus far.

Today’s story involves painting our bedroom. A task that I thought would be relatively easy. I’ve painted before. Lots of times before. I knew it was a task that would rank pretty high on the scale of monotony, but I also thought it would rank pretty high on the scale of ease. Wrong on that last count. Real wrong.

Our bedroom started as a deep shape of teal (see below). It wasn’t an unattractive color, just overwhelming and in poor shape. The final goal of the entire house is to have color be prominent, but welcoming and warm. This room did not fit that bill.

To begin the process I picked our color scheme: Dover White for all trim, Muslin for ceiling, and Ancestral Gold for our walls (all colors Sherwin Williams). Warning on the Ancestral Gold- it is a nice shade of green in our room, but can become very gold/brown in other lighting. You should always sample your color choices out before committing. Another note on color choice, it helps to have a design choice picked out for your room to help guide in color choice. We had bought a rug on our trip to visit David’s home country and picked the color based off of that. There are a million paint colors in the world, but you become limited by rug, fabric, and furniture choices.

On to actual projecting! We painted our room in order of ceiling, moldings, and then walls. I was so confident about our ability to knock this out in a weekend that we didn’t even move our furniture out of the room. Just pushed everything into the center and covered it with a tarp (see picture above 😒). Our enthusiasm outranked our logic on this one. We got to sleep in our bed 1 night after this decision because all we had accomplished in 1 day was buying supplies at the store and then cutting our toe molding down to size. I will say using the miter saw was and still is a lot of fun!

On the second day we divided and conquered with 1 person painting the ceiling (2 coats) and the other person tackling all of the sanding that needed to be done. And there was so much sanding that needed to be done: 2 window frames, 1 large closet frame, a door frame, and all of the base boards. The sanding became so overwhelming and such a blur I can not even remember if that was finished that day or not… my guess is not. What I do remember is being spent at 9 p.m. on a Sunday night, David and I staring at each other wondering where we were going to sleep that night. We had a bedroom covered in sawdust with our bed under a tarp in that room. At that point we had no guest bedroom set up. All I can say is God bless my sister. I called her and she answered my call at 9 on a Sunday night despite the fact that she has a life and family that she has to manage. She lent us an air mattress that we setup in our living room. Over the next 2 weeks we got to camp in our living room. It did not add to the fun. But I will say it did add to the story.

Over the following work week we did as much as we could, which I recall was not much because -life. The next weekend we hunkered down determined to finish. We accomplished a lot, but did not finish. I actually wrote down a very specific to-do list for us to keep track of what we had done, what was left to do, and to give us that the wonderful satisfaction of checking something off the list. We did not finish the list but made our way through a chunk of it. We painted all of the trimmings- 2 coats of primer (a tip from my paint expert sister- primer is cheaper than semi-gloss paint and wood is dark and hard to cover) and 2 coats of paint, installed the new toe moldings, puttied and patched the walls, caulked EVERYTHING, and got the first coat of primer up on the walls. I would be lying if I said just leaving the walls with primer was not a temptation we considered. Just lightening the walls made a world of difference! And with the ceiling and moldings finished it almost looked like a complete room!

However, we persevered. Rather than let life take over during the next week we spent all free time finishing the room. We added another coat of primer 1 night. And then added a layer of paint each following night. Our strategy- I did all of the edging and David followed me with the roller to fill in the walls. My end of week we had a finished room!

In our excitement to be done we forgot to take an after picture of the empty room… The bed set shown in this picture was quickly swapped out because it hurt my brain to see the yellow and the new painted room together. This entire bed set was always intended to become the guest bedroom. And became that soon after! Essentially, I am asking you to look past the décor and appreciate the new painted bedroom. Warm, welcoming, and cozy. And lovely with our rug (which I apparently forgot to photograph it with). Exactly the look we wanted 🙂

Fun side notes to add to this tale-

• It was during this period of time that David found out he had passed his final CPA exam. I remember him rushing into the living room to wake me up at 3 in the morning after he had ninja snuck to check his score.
• We also bought our current bedroom set during this time. This was completely unplanned, but someone was selling a bedroom set on Facebook that I couldn’t pass up. It was a French provincial style set that was exactly what I wanted. It was too good of a price to pass up so it was bought and stored in our living room making our camping situation all the more cozy during this time!