Painting Blues (or Greens)

When our realtor walked through out home a month ago, I thought that she would give us a lot of ideas about what we should do to get the house ready to sell.  Instead of doing that, she said that her company had a specialist who would meet with us and go through it all.  I was very nervous about meeting her as I wasn't sure what she would recommend.  We had already done a lot, I wasn't that excited about doing much more.  

Once we met with Andrea, I felt a lot better.  Most of her items were suggestions on what to have in each room and what to take out.  I was excited that she would bring accents, bedding, towels, and such to stage the house for pictures and showings.  She focused a lot on our backyard and we talked about easy landscaping ideas.  Everything that she suggested sounded doable, except for one - painting our large dining room, kitchen, and hallway.  Doug really didn't want to do it, but realized that it needed it.  

The first step was to pick a color.  Andrea suggested to use the one in our living room.  After looking at samples, however, we all agreed that it was too yellow.  Instead we found one that was cream with some highlights of green in it that we all liked.  She picked sage for the new door colors to match.

Doug had told me that it would be a lot of work to paint it all, especially around the custom built cabinets.  I didn't really realize how much time consuming it would all be until we got started Saturday morning.  Doug focused on the walls and I painted the trim and kitchen.  It was a lot harder than I thought that it would be.  The paint could not be easily cleaned off of the cabinets, so I had to be very careful around them.  I couldn't tape them as the paint would seep underneath, so at times I had to use a Q-Tip to get close to them.  Doug got so much more wall space painted than I did as it took me seven hours just to get a first coat on near the cabinets and in the kitchen.  I did cry once when I though that it was going to be impossible to finish one section, but thankfully, I eventually figure it out.  As we cleaned up today after well over twenty hours of painting, I definitely could see that it looked a lot better.  The two tone wall were gone, the color was neutral, the space looked even bigger, the kitchen walls were a lot cleaner and the sage door to the garage looked very nice.  We realized that the small bathroom on the main level would probably look better a different color, but for now we decided just to be happy with what we had done.