Progress: The Beginnings [Painting]

After priming we painted the walls (with color) and textured the ceilings. Here is where we have and had most of our regrets.

 I agonized over the color I wanted to paint the main portion of the house for weeks. My parents had recently painted their house a gorgeous shade of tan, and I wanted something similar. I tried multiple samples before time really got crunched and I said screw it, and had my parent's paint color (it was Benjamin Moore) matched at Home Depot. I thought it was passable at first, but I grew to hate it. We actually just repainted over (most) of it last weekend, but that will be a story for another post.

This was the tan color. As you can see I didn't bother to tape off the trim or try and avoid it because I knew we were going to be replacing it. (And it's hard to tell in the bottom photo- which is our living room- but tearing off the paneling left huge glue spots on the walls, which we later decided to beadboard over.)

For the bedroom I chose a pale blue similar to the one that the previous homeowners had painted it. I had a gorgeous inspiration picture, but in the end I've grown to dislike the blue as well. I'm going through a grey phase right now I suppose. Also, just taping off the top part of the wall did not cut it for spray texture protection. That stuff got EVERYWHERE.

During a strange girly phase I had insisted at painting the office in our apartment a Barbie pink color. Because we still had some of it left over we decided to use it on the office in our new home. Can you guess if I started to hate it? Can you guess what color the office is now? ;)

Texturing the ceilings ourselves was the biggest mistake we made in regards to our house. N thought that repairing the drywall would be easy, and well, he's good at a LOT of things, but working with drywall is NOT one of them.

We rented this bad boy from Home Depot and concocted our own mix of a subtle orange peel. We had debated doing knockdown, but our walls are a very strange brush splatter (?) texture and the two would not have looked good together. In our next house EVERYTHING WILL BE KNOCKDOWN DARN IT!

Here were the ceilings after they were sprayed but before they were painted:

I don't have any pictures of what the ceilings currently look like but I will make sure to take some. In many places you can see the drywall seams and it's just a hot mess in some places. My biggest tip? If you've never done drywall and texturing before LEAVE IT TO THE PROS! We didn't really have a choice since we were broker than broke and had to get it done, but now we'll be paying someone to fix this mess before we move out.