My office has color!

Yes, you read that right, I FINALLY painted our office! While most people choose to sit around the pool and bbq over the July 4th weekend, I was hard at work Saturday painting. It was a long day, but I am very pleased with the outcome - yay color! I chose the color "Wythe Blue" by Ben Moore, but opted to buy Lowe's brand of paint, Valspar, to be on the cheap side. That may have been my only big mistake. I ended up using close to three gallons of paint. I think if I had gone with the better quality, Ben Moore, it might have been different. I think the root of all evil turned out to be the walls themselves. Unfortunately all the walls in our home are textured, therefore getting paint to cover every nook and cranny took a lot of rolling.

First up was taping around the windows and french doors. I used green Frog Tape, which was awesome, I highly recommend it.

Next I cut in along the ceiling, around the windows and the wall joints. I wasn’t planning on taping along the floorboards, but after painting around the ceiling I quickly learned taping would be the best option – and I’m so happy I did. The frog tape created a clean, crisp edge.

I used a roller for the walls, and ended up painting two full coats, then touched up some missed spots. I removed the tape, let it all dry over night, and voila! It feels so nice to have a little color in our all beige house. --DS

An easy way to test paint samples on your walls

I've been trying to decide on paint colors for various rooms in our house for awhile now. There are paint swatches all over my house, it's ridiculous. I recently learned a new trick from a designer that I wanted to share, and wish I had thought of from the get go.

To avoid the not so attractive paint blocks all over your walls, just paint the color sample on posterboard. Yes, go out and buy a sheet of posterboard that we used for projects back in school (it felt kind of funny to buy a few sheets, I had flashbacks of the millions of times I used them back in the day). Cut the posterboard in half, unless you want a really large sample. Then use painters tape (I used the green frog paint tape I had on hand), and tape it down to a table or counter, shiny side down, so you paint on the matte side. Leave an inch or so border on the posterboard when you tape. Paint the posterboard, then leave it taped down until the paint dries. Slowly peel off the green tape from all sides, and you've got a great large color block of your sample! Use the painters tape to tape it on the wall in the room you want to paint.








What's great is that you can move the posterboard around to different walls in the room to see the color in different lighting. And if you're like me and now have two shoe boxes full of different colors, be sure to write the paint color on the posterboard so you won't have to guess what it is later!!

I think I'm going to finally paint the office this weekend - pics to come next week! --DS