Walls, Ceilings and more walls.

Looking for a colour scheme I loved through thousands of paint swatches and home magazines was fun but time-consuming. I could recite the various shades of grey by eyesight alone and the local B&Q store knew me on a first name basis. I knew I wanted to pair grey with a sunny yellow in the living/dining room, but there were so many options to go with.

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As you can see from the photos the walls were terrible, especially the centre walls through the middle of the house. The previous owner had put a horrible floral paper up, I suspect to hide the state of the walls. We stripped the dated beige paper back to the above.

This was when I decided we didn’t need two doors into the living area, especially as it had been opened up. Again I wanted to make it as cheap as possible and had no idea how much blocking up a door would cost. I even looked into doing it myself, but figured it needed doing fairly quickly as I wanted to crack on with the decorating.

It was about this time that just by chance Andy bumped into his builder friend from school. We got him to block up the first door and plaster the wall, it seemed like fate had dropped him in our lap. We were also really cheeky and asked him to patch up a few hidden areas that needed plastering. Areas we hadn’t noticed on our walk around pre-purchase, such as behind the master bedroom door. After this was done we put lining paper up on that wall, I did look at some really nice wallpaper, but felt the brick fireplaces were enough of a feature and the room would look too busy.

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I love Dulux paint. We had used it previously, so we knew it would be hard wearing and cover well. I settled on ‘Pebble Shore’ in a matt paint for the Living/Dining area. It was lucky we were still in rented accommodation, so the house was empty of all furniture to paint the walls. As you can see from the picture the kids had fun in the empty rooms however I was anxious because we were painting, and they wouldn’t stop running around.

I love that ‘Pebble Shore‘ is a warm grey. I’d visited homes that use grey in their decor and the rooms always seemed cold and unwelcoming. It was my intention to use accessories in a warm yellow to make the room pop.

The same shade of grey was used for the master bedroom. It was lucky the other bedrooms and Hallway/Landing were painted in a neutral magnolia. This looked like it had been freshened up, so we felt these areas could wait awhile. The kitchen and breakfast room was already grey, but strangely it looked like the previous owner had run out of paint halfway through, he had painted half the kitchen in a darker shade of grey than the other half. This didn’t really sit well with me. I don’t think anyone would have actually noticed, but I knew and every time I entered the room it niggled me. It’s so hard being a perfectionist, I put it down to being a Virgo. Lol!

We used Dulux for this area as well but in a cooler shade of ‘Chic Shadow‘. To be fair once dry, you couldn’t even tell we had painted unless you looked closely. I definitely felt like we could’ve saved money on this, it was purely to make me feel better about the room.

It took us approximately 1 week before we officially moved into the property to paint everywhere. This included white matt emulsion for the ceilings and white gloss for all the woodwork. (Although I regret that now, but I’ll leave that for another blog). We didn’t have time off from work, so we were going in every evening and staying until about 10pm. I’m not sure whether it’s unusual to paint before moving into a property, as this was our first time, but I think we did a pretty snazzy job, what do you think?