Painting

Project time is back in swing! Remember this hallway?

Yep, my bowling ally/mental hospital, hallway...

Well, Bryan and I decided that this weekend was going to be a great weekend to start the "fix the hallway" or "put in some chair rail" or "hang a gallery wall" project. We have a few names for it ;)!

We decided to go ahead and bring the color that is already in the living room and kitchen and carry it through into the hall. So we took a sample of the paint into Lowe's and had them match it. It turns out the color is called Belgian Waffle. Lol! My walls are the color of a fluffy, buttery, breakfast food! But it was either continue with this color or repaint the whole house.... So Belgian Waffle it was!

Then we needed to find a good color to match it to go on the bottom 1/3 of the wall. I think it looks nicer to have two colors with the chair rail between them. We tried a few different variations of the Belgian Waffle color and pretty much hated them all. So we decided to go with something neutral that would go well with both the current color and the color I would have liked to paint if we didn't have to paint the whole house. (Did that make any sense?) Anyway, we decided to go with a brown color. We tried a few light browns and didn't like the way those looked with the current color. We ended up with Chocolate Turtle. Again, my wall is the color of a food! lol! At least this time it's a yummy desert type of food!

Allrighty, so we picked out our paints, got a few supplies (rollers, tape, nail hole filler, etc.) and went to work... kinda! We had A LOT of prep work to do. Saturday afternoon we measured, marked, and leveled a pencil line all the way down the hall and in all the nooks and crannies. This would mark where the chair rail would go. Then we had to take a break to go to Bryan's mom's house for a game night. I have to admit it was a welcome break from all the leveling and marking and then erasing and re-measuring and re-marking. Which, by the way, is not easy to do when you only have two pencils and no pencil sharpener! So that was our Saturday. Sunday came and was full of taping and Belgian Waffle paint. I'm not 100% sure why, maybe it had something to do with the weird teeny tiny corners,

Or maybe it was all the "fixtures" that needed to be covered or taken down,

or maybe it has something to do with the fact that our walls are forever long and a little over 10 feet high and I'm only 5'2"! But for whatever reason it took us all day to paint just the top half! We took a break around 5:30 to go to my mom and dad's for dinner and a visit. It was also a much needed break!

When we got home Bryan quickly gave Michelle a bath while I touched up a few spots that didn't get quite enough paint. Then we read scriptures, said prayers and said night-night to Michelle. While Michelle slept Bryan and I spent the rest of the night painting the bottom half of the hall. It took literally all night! I think, with clean up, it took up till about 11:45 or 12:00 to finish.

This is how it turned out...

What do you think? I'm pretty sure I'm the worst color picker EVER! lo! But it is what it is and we can always paint over it later. I really like the bottom color. I'm just not too crazy about the way it looks with the top color. Maybe once we get the actual chair rail (instead of just the white line), and some pictures hung I won't hate it as much. Hate is a strong word... maybe I won't dislike it as much. And the next time we paint (which will be to repaint the whole house and cover up the Belgian Waffle color) I'm probably going to bring Jess or Mom with me so they can pick the new color. lol!

I just realized that I kept saying I was finished painting. I'm not. After we took the tape down we noticed that the dark brown was really good at getting under the tape. So we have a lot of this (see below) to clean up still.
I think I'll stick to simple projects for a little while. The chair rail might have to wait a week or two.