Progress.

Well, after right around 19 hours of painting this weekend, we have made some progress on the walls in the living room & kitchen. To be honest, I enjoyed about 15 of those hours of painting because I found it relaxing to trim & roll since it made my brain focus just on paint. It was a relief to relax my thoughts and shut off all the thinking for a few hours. But by hour 15, I started to get impatient and flat-out tired of painting {go figure.}

We’ve worked hard this week & despite the chaotic state of my house right now, I feel like we’ve made good progress. Since I’m a list-makin kind of girl, humor me while I spout off all our checks for this week {this makes me happy.} :)

• Clean living room & kitchen walls
• Clean living room, hallway & kitchen ceilings
• Remove nails & curtain rods in living room & kitchen
• Spackle & sand nail holes
• Remove frame on half doorway ledge between kitchen & living room
• Spackle & sand half doorway ledge
• Paint two coats on kitchen ceiling
• Paint in living room ceiling {bye bye sparkles!}
• Paint hallway ceiling
• Trim & prime kitchen walls
• Trim & prime living room walls
• Trim & paint first river reed coat in kitchen
• Trim & paint second & last river reed coat in kitchen {halfway done}
• Put the rooms back together

Yeah for progress!

So here’s some pics from this weekend. Here’s the messy state of our living room once ceilings were painted & walls were primed with the Problem Solving Primer I mentioned Friday. PS you can see some of my wondrous blooms in the pic below. More on those later this week. ;) It was funny to me how much larger the living room seemed once we covered over that awful deep maroon.

Yikes. Whatamess.

For the paint color in the kitchen, we used Olympic Premium {zero VOC} in River Reed. I’ve posted the pic of the lid with the color’s specifics fyi.

Oh, and I took some Young House Love advice and bought their highly recommended Premium XL Tight Spots 2″ Angle Short Handle Brush found at Sherwin-Williams for right around five bucks. And let me tell you, this baby was oh so worth it! I’m a cheapskate, but man this brush was nice! It really made it so much easier to trim a straight line.

Um, got a little paint on your fingernail. {I’m a messy painter, there, I admitted it.} So here’s the River Reed first coat going on…

Below is the first coat dried next to the white primed area I’ll be adding chalkboard paint to later {see my mood board for more explanation}.

 

Oh, and nothing like finding dog food in your paint pail. Mmmm.

And here’s the two walls we did the second {and final} coat of River Reed on. I took this pic this morning, before the sun was fully risen, so the lighting’s a little rough, but you get the idea.

I like the color, and I think I’ll really like it once we get rid of the hideous red faux brick vinyl flooring and paint the doors & trim white. Slowly but surely, we’ll get there. :)