Living room update...almost done!

As you know, we've been working on updating our living room.  A few weeks ago I shared our progress (be sure to check out the before pictures, it's such a big change!) and now I'm back with the (almost) finished product of all our hard work!  We're finally rid of that crazy olive colored wall and we have nice, crisp, white trim.

When my husband and I started talking about how to update the house, we tossed around the idea of buying all new interior doors and trim.  The doors and trim were all a dated, orangey, stained wood and that just isn’t our style.  When we estimated how much replacing all of that would cost, we started to think of other ways we could update the look of the house while on a budget.  We decided that painting the doors and trim would be the most cost effective and since they were really in pretty decent shape, we decided to go for it.  Knowing we wanted it to look as professional as possible, we bought a really nice paint sprayer to help us with the task.  We cleared out most of the furniture from the room and taped off the areas we didn’t want to paint and got to spraying.  I realize our “really nice paint sprayer” came with a large price tag, but it was so worth it to us.  We got the spraying done SO fast.  And with a toddler running around and not being able to use the main room of the house, that was important to us.  It only took us a day to spray three coats of trim paint in the living room.  The foyer took an extra day because the trim was being stubborn and the paint wouldn’t stick to it, so we had to do some extra sanding and then re-sprayed it.  If we had done all that work by hand, it would have taken so much longer and probably wouldn’t look as clean and crisp as it does now.  We’re really happy with the finish the spraying left on our trim.  It looks very professional.

After we got all the spraying done, we primed the walls and then picked out a wall color and started painting.  The color we chose is called Repose Gray by Sherwin Williams.  It’s the same color as the inside of our pantry.  I should mention that I am terrible at picking paint colors for walls.  I absolutely hate it.  I don’t know what it is about it, but it is so hard for me.  We ended up trying about 8 different colors before we ended up choosing the color we did.  Our walls looked like they had the chicken pox because we had so many samples painted everywhere!  When we were done painting, I was a little, okay a lot, nervous about the color.  I thought it looked too gray, cold, and modern.  I was a little stressed since we had taken so much time trying to find the perfect color and then it didn’t look like I had envisioned it.  But when we got all of our furniture back in the room, it really warmed it up and made it feel more like “us”.  I’m really happy with it now and I think as we add more accessories, pictures, etc. it will look and feel just like we as a family want it to.  We definitely need some sort of focal wall over the couch.  I’m thinking a gallery wall of all different sized frames with family photos in them.  I think it will be fun and different!

Here you can see the hallway to the right.  We have one painted door, but the rest of the doors and trim haven't been painted yet.  We're getting there!

I’ll share more as we get more done (including more info on that cute yellow end table next to the couch!), but I wanted to show you the major progress we made.  I know we want to paint the rest of the house, but we are going to take it slow and do projects as they fit in our budget.  I’d love to hear from you if you have any questions or comments!

Thanks so much for stopping by my blog!