The Living Room: Pushing Through

So, there we were – in the living room where we bit off more than we could chew – with new floors and a renewed drive to finish the work we had started (at that point in time) over a year and a half ago. Of course, we should have realized then that our plans never seem to pan out in the time span we hope or expect them to. (I guess we’re slow learners?) The floors may have been finished but there was still SO. MUCH. WORK. left for us to do.

In the meantime, we learned how to attach and mud over corner beading, layering spackle on the ceiling, skimming the walls, and all-around smaller projects that would get us one step closer to finishing this room. But push met shove and eventually, motivation failed us again. We were exhausted, cranky and otherwise just plain over working on this room. And so we stopped and the living room sat again for another year. We learned to live with the disaster we called remodel-in-progress, despite the fact that it still bothered us to walk by the unfinished room each day.

Which brings us to this spring. Still somewhat high off the recent success of our bedroom conversion and a potential deadline of my relatives coming out to visit, we decided to make one last push to get the living room finished.

Nothing quite like working with a hard and fast time limit hanging over your head, giving ourselves approximately 2 weeks to get the room cleared, painted, and put back together. No pressure. We had a brief debate about skimming the remaining walls, but with a short timeline and a still somewhat injured husband, I opted to skip it and in the end, it wasn’t necessary.

The most difficult part for me, aside from working on the ceiling – short person problems – was painting. Not the actual act of painting but the whole process. I have to worst anxiety when it comes to committing to color on the walls. I bought paint for our living room nearly 2 years ago – a really beautiful shade called Van Courtland Blue by Benjamin Moore.

It sat and sat and I found it rather disappointing that I wasn’t able to use it. When the time finally came I was so excited to finally be using it! I rolled a patch on the walls and then panic set it. It was SO DARK! Not truly a dark color but more so than I had anticipated. I began mulling over in my mind all the various situations in which I could get away with using this color and not have it overwhelm the room. I resigned myself to an accent wall but when I ran it past the hubby he promptly shot that down. He doesn’t usually get too involved with my color choices and conversations around color usually go something like this:

            Me: So what do you think?
            Him: It’s nice.
            Me: Just nice?
            Him: The husband part of me says ‘I like it, sweetie’. The ‘me’  part of me says ‘It’s blue’.

This time was different, however, and with him insisting on the whole room being this color and not just one wall, even getting excited about the what the finished product might be once we had the baseboard trim and crown molding up. So I let him have his way. Doing my best to push aside any concerns, I pulled up my big girl pants and buckled down to paint.

Stick around for the final installment of our living room saga – coming soon!