Ch Ch Ch Changes....

Over the course of the past month we have been working on some minor home improvements that included purging junk from almost every room in our house and getting more organized.

The man cave is slowly turning into a playroom now that Asher is becoming more and more mobile. Our previous arrangement cut the room in half and was one of the only rooms in the house that wasn't painted. Stark White walls, yuck. Sterile. We had also inherited the bookshelves in the back from Philip's childhood room and they were too small for that wall. So we purged them and moved them to other locations in the house to free up the back wall.

Old Set Up

New Arrangement (we need to bolt the bookcases to the wall)

One early 6 am morning while breast feeding Asher I had a light bulb moment. Use paint we already had and measure out even sqaures to paint in different colors on our back wall to give the room some color (can you picture this? probably not). I had seen it on hgtv rate my space or some design show. It had been FIVE YEARS since we painted anything and this was going to be a Minimal Cost project. Philip was less than thrilled since our last painting project he got stuck with finishing it because I was so upset that the painted bled past our taped lines....and so I begin, with his assistance. We had planned on using regular painter's tape and applying a glaze around the edges to prevent bleeding...but we decided to skip that extra step and buy Frog Tape. Frog Tape is AMAZING. We had heard about it from friends but blew them off since we would "never paint". Riiight! According to Philip Frog Tape is the same cost as regular tape and it creates an automatic barrier. Totally worth the money we paid for it.

We went through our 25+ paint cans and picked 5 colors we thought would complement each other well. Red from our dining room in our townhouse, a red we planned to mix, two greens from Asher's nursery, Grey from the downstairs and black chalkboard paint. We plotted the squares...but ended up moving many of them once we got the paint on the walls. We wanted them to be random.

Somewhere in the middle of our Saturday Snowed in Painting extravaganza I freaked out and decided it was going to be impossible to mix a red we liked after several attempts. Philip headed off to Home Depot and came back with this color: NC State red by Glidden. It looked awful.

Trip #2 to Home Depot and I returned with a darker Gray and a red better suited to my taste.

We are very pleased with the way the design came out. Our "almost free project" turned out to be a little more expensive than we anticipated but still totally worth the $50 we paid to get the colors right! Hopefully we will all enjoy Asher's new playroom!

Now we just need some green accent pillows!