Project update: living and dining room

Finally, I get to report back about the walls in the living and dining rooms, from which we tore wallpaper many, many months ago. To refresh your memory, here's my original post about removing the wallpaper. The date? April 2011. Almost a year ago. I blame other projects getting in the way, not enough weekends in a year, and a bad case of procrastination. I love how at the end of that post, I say I'll have an update in a couple of weeks. Optimistic!

Here's the "before" picture again, but be careful - looking at it may cause side effects such as nausea and cross-eyes.

Baby blue with Barbie pink, and a dingy grey trim. Not exactly visually appealing, to say the least. The pink part was originally covered in a silvery blue wallpaper:

I guess it was less offensive with the wallpaper hiding the pink stuff, but we're not really the wallpaper type, and it was old, dirty, and full of nicks and tears.

It took us a while to find the right colors for these rooms. The main consideration was for them not to be blue. Or pink. And especially not both (so purple was right out). For a while I toyed with the idea of using white beadboard for the bottom half of the room, but it would have been a lot of work to cut it for all the outlets and baseboard heaters, so we stuck with paint. Here's how it looks now:

Don't worry, Donald approves. He just hates having his picture taken.

We chose to do the trim in bright white, both because it looks nice, and because it's going to be easier to deal with the trim in the house if we do everything in white. With baseboard heaters and crown molding in most rooms, and a chair rail, bay window, and built-in shelves in the living room and dining room, we have a lot of trim, so this way we always just need to buy plain white paint to touch up damaged areas, instead of figuring out which almost-white color we used for which room.

The top half is called "Churchill Hotel Ecru", and in reality it's not quite as pinkish as the Donald photo makes it out to be. The picture of the built-in shelves is more accurate. The bottom half is "Churchill Hotel Maple", and the fact that they're both from the same historic building reassures me that they go well together. They're both from Valspar's National Trust for Historic Preservation collection. Yes, we like neutrals, and most of the house is painted in calm neutral colors, but I'm ok with that. As much as I admire the bright colors on home decorating shows, I don't think I'd be happy with them in my own home for very long. Nice to look at, but not to live in, at least for me.

Within a month or two, after we paint the family room downstairs, we'll also be checking "new floors" off our to-do list, and I'm excited to see how different and wonderful this place will look once we replace the nasty old stained carpets with fluffy new ones (and some hardwood)!