Living Room Battle

A couple weekends ago we woke up bright and early and ready to tackle the living room - with paint. The time had finally come for the living room to get it's update. Now, don't get me wrong, we are far from done with the kitchen - we're only about halfway there - but we know it's gonna take alot of time to do that all that tile work, and so we are taking a raincheck on it until we both will have tons of time to spend on it - Spring Break. Well, Tom's Spring Break, anyways, just a regular work week for me. Oh, the downsides of the business world...

Anyways, back to the topic: the living room. It is the first thing you see as you walk through our front door, and also the reason we fell in love with our house and bought it. It has a cathedral ceiling with wood beams, along with a large window and a fabulous corner stone fireplace. It is magnificent. We love it. We know it's a bit dated, but it has character and is so unique compared to other houses on our block. And the stones in the fireplace and the wood beams actually remind me of my parents' house, so it brings back some wonderful memories for me.

So on Saturday, we armed ourselves with paintbrushes, frog tape, and several ladders (that ceiling is high!), and officially attacked the living room with all we got. First we piled all the furniture into the middle of the room, and covered every single inch of our beautiful floors to prevent any paint spillage and therefore damage. After caulking and filling in a few holes/cracks (like where someone in the past had slammed the door handle into the wall), we busted out the frog tape and got to work. Around this time, reinforcements showed up in the form of Tom's Mom - who helped us get the painting done even faster!

Barley wanted to help... he was a sad little puppy, trapped behind his baby-gate...

In the middle of the full-on attack, Tom's Mom ran to get more supplies from Lowe's, and returned with a super-weapon to aide us in battle: this guy.

We were a bit weary at first, but he ended up saving the day! To sum it up: you put the paint can in one end, where a hose sucks the paint out, through a tube all the way to the other end, where it comes out of an attachment of your choice (the corner and trim attachments worked great, too!). Apparently, you can paint up to 54 square feet a minute - according to the box. I'd love to see that in action! I wonder how good of a paint job results from it...

Needless to say, we did not paint 54 square feet a minute (haha), but still managed to cut down our painting time tremendously! This super -weapon worked wonders (and it wasn't too hard to clean, either).

After a few hours, the living room was painted! Hooray!

The next day, Sunday, we went around the room replacing all the outlets and light switches with some shiny new white ones - little things like that really end up making a huge difference, too! It's nice to turn on the lights now, and doesn't feel like I'm flipping a power breaker, or pushing on a lever, every time I do.

Then we rehung our window treatments (I had picked up some new white drapes from Tarjay), threw down our new rug (9$ on clearance.. not too bad), and installed a coat rack by the door - and it was finished! Well, not completely, because we still need decorations on the walls, but it is definitely getting there. :)

Before:

After:

Not too shabby, huh? Of coure it's not finished, but it's definitely tons closer than from where it started! Needless to say, we are not sad to see the pee-yellow color go.