The Evolution of Our Living Room pt 1 \\ What We Started With and Choosing A White Paint

I cannot tell you how long this has taken me to write. For some reason, I kept editing and rewriting this post because I just wasn’t sure how to go about it! I know that you folks can appreciate a good Before and After, but I just felt like there were so many images I wanted to share and it was about a fifty-hour long blog post. So, I decided to break things up just a little bit to share what we started with. Plus, you can see the process of how we chose a white paint. Which isn’t as easy as they say it is. And the big ol’ mess during the painting process.

Confession: I love yellow. I love it. It’s a beautiful color that evokes a lot of happy feelings for me. I love it on clothes. On book covers. In art. All over my food (lookin’ at you, lemons.). But I don’t love it on my walls. When we first saw this house, we loved it from the outside. It was this beautiful fort that was hidden in a bunch of trees. You couldn’t really see it from the road and it was so refreshing when peeking around the shrubs and seeing this long white brick beauty. So we knew we’d love the inside, right? Well, we walked inside and the walls were all a different color. The living rooms were yellow. One bedroom was olive. Another was bright green AND white. The third bedroom? Blue stripes. Our work was basically cut out for us.

I wrote about some of the home renovation projects we have in store for this year and you can refresh your memory right here! We knew that the home had some good bones to work with and build from, but the plans we have will take time (and some good money-saving habits. still waiting for that powerball win…) so we had to think about what we could change now. For me, I felt like the biggest thing was that yellow. It had to go.

We had tossed around the idea of painting everything, but every time we got serious about it, we never pulled the trigger. After scheduling a shoot for Disney Family at our house last fall, I knew we needed to get er’ done. There were a few white paints that I loved, but after I got them up on the walls, it was pretty clear which would ones could possibly work and which wouldn’t. We have a few brick walls in our home that were painted white, so we decided to make things easier on ourselves by choosing a white paint to match that. (Because who wants to paint all over the brick again?!? More work than it needs to be…)

After painting swatch after swatch all over every wall in this house, we were able to land on a white we liked and that seemed to work for this space. It’s hard, guys. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that choosing a white paint is easy. BECAUSE THEY’RE LIARS.

One: this room was a bit of a catch all for random pillows and furniture. Two: yes, that fern was slowly slipping away. I’ve never claimed to have a green thumb.
In the past, Logan and I have always been the painters. We’ve painted bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms, and more. And I just didn’t have it in me this time so we were lucky enough to be able to pay someone to come in and do that part of the job for us!

Before we hired the painter, we spoke with a few different reps about paint options and what would look good in our home. You know how they tell you to paint swatches on the walls so you can see the paint in all sorts of different light as the day goes by? Well, I’ll 9see your paint swatches and raise you one crazy woman who needed to see the paint on EVERY wall…

We were working with a few different options when choosing a white paint:

Super White by Benjamin Moore
Simply White by Benjamin Moore
White Dove by Sherwin Williams
Chantilly Lace by Benjamin Moore
Decorator’s White by Benjamin Moore
White Picket Fence by Dunn Edwards

I had heard fantastic things about Super White & Simply White by Benjamin Moore so those were the first two I started with. And then as I started examining more white options, I picked up a few others so that I felt like I was covering different shades.

I got to work painting swatches on literally every wall in the our main living area. I had marked each swatch with a number so that I could reference the paint. Some of the swatches were had blue undertones and just weren’t jiving with me after they were up on the wall.

The white brick throughout the house has some creamy undertones, and after living with these swatches for weeks, I felt like Simply White by my boy, Ben, seemed to do the trick. It worked best next to all the brick and still felt bright and clean enough throughout the rest of the space.

We told our painter which color we chose and he got to work!

Moving the furniture may have been the most annoying part of all of this? Let me just say this, if you’re paying for painters, do it for a BIG job. I’m not telling you how to live your life or paint your dream house, but if the job is something small like a bedroom, you can most likely tackle it if you have the time (and the patience). So much of a painter’s fees include prepping the space. Covering the floor, fixtures, and taping everything off takes hours. HOURS. We weren’t planning to paint the ceilings at this time, but our painter had pointed out the fact that any painter doing the work in the future would be taping down the same areas and we would be paying for all of that again. After choosing a white paint, we decided to cover the walls and ceiling in the same color, but different finishes. Maybe he upsold us, but he had a point. SO, we just bit the bullet and did the whole shebang to save us some time and money in the long run. Aside from the two living areas, he also did the dining area, around the kitchen, down the hall, and one of the bedrooms. (We’ll be sharing more about the girls’ rooms later!) It was a big gig and would have taken a lot of my sanity.

The entire process took a few days, and luckily, the fort has a few doors on the other side so we could enter and exit from over there, as well as access the master bedroom and bath. The four of us were crammed back there for just a bit, but we made it work! After everything was sprayed and sprayed some more, we were done. And it feels like a much different house now! That could be in large part due to the fact that the mess and all the clutter was cleaned up and cleared out.
buh-bye, yellow.