Painting is (Half) Done!

Wow, this is embarassing.  I haven't blogged in so long, I forgot if I upload the photos to Picasa Web albums first, or via the blog.  I'm sure I'll figure it out momentarily.

The painters are done -- which is to say, the painters are finished, but my house isn't.  I'd purchased "40 hours of painter" in a deal from Angie's List.  "40 hours of painter" translated into two guys working two very long days.  It also translated into painting: my kitchen, laundry room, itty bitty bathroom, dining room, living room, and family room.  Well, most of it.  There's a huge beam across my family room ceiling that needs another coat (on one side) and quite a bit of the trim didn't get done.  Which is ok, because they guys worked pretty darned hard, and I've got the other half of the house to get painted anyway, so we can just add finishing these details onto that job.

I wanted to show you some before and after pics of painting my walls -- but that would have been easier if I'd taken "before" shots.   The best that I can do is show you the biggest change -- because I have the "before" photo from way back when I bought the house.  Let me introduce you to what has been my least favorite wall ever since that time..  Observe:

(Ooo, better to upload to Picasa first.  Now I know.)

OK, least favorite wall:

OK, you can see that it's pink.  What you might be missing is that it is textured.  There are vertical lines running all through it.  I thought this might be textured wallpaper, but the painter guy confirmed that it's actually in the plaster.  Some genius thought it would be a good idea to texture up this wall forever.  I'd either have to spackle up the whole wall or just deal with it.

I dealt.  I painted it over with a lovely (and rather rmore neutral) cream color.  Now (from a slightly different perspective, and with stuff in the room), the wall looks like this:

Holy crap, it's genuinely pretty.  Look at a detail of the texture:

It looks almost elegant.  (Particularly with the shiny white accent color, rather than the brown which was there before.)  I'm very pleased with this -- it came out much better than I'd anticipated.

Those dark rose colored valances over the windows now look really out of place.  (Yay!)