Do it yourself-ers

Well we finished another do-it-yourself project today, which was painting some accent walls. We just love lots of bright color, but the painters charge quite a bit for multiple paint colors so we decided to buy the paint ourselves and just do a wall here and there to make it a manageable project. Originally my color scheme was not so vibrant, but then we went to Sherwin Williams and got some brochures and I was totally inspired to rev things up a little.

I planned to do this project all on my own on Friday. Gray and I gathered our supplies (paint, brushes, rollers, etc for me and sand toys for Gray) and headed over for what I imagined would be a productive afternoon. I was way too excited. Turned out the "real" painters were still very much at work so we ended up spending a not so fun afternoon excavating in the storage closet, mostly looking for a dress that I never did find. I was very disappointed, yet one thing the Lord is trying to teach me is peace. When things don't go my way, whether big or small, I *can* have peace if I remember that God is very much involved in my life and working things out the way he knows is best. I can have hope that even if things don't seem right in this life, they will one day all be made right again. So yes, it was just a day that didn't go as planned and I figured it would work out another day.

Then Matt decided out of the blue that we would go Sunday to paint and he would help me. What a surprise, and by the end of the job I was more than a little grateful for his assistance! The task before us was to paint a mere 4 walls, two of them not even full height, and I assumed it would be a snap. And then I began, and those hours of painting various walls of my parents' house came screaming back at me as I remembered that wall painting isn't half so much fun as painting on a canvas. But with Matt hard at work taping and painting downstairs and the boys playing their hearts out in the backyard, I kept working and hoping we'd get finished, with no electricity and evening looming before us. Four hours, many "oops", and countless, "Can we go home now?"s later, we cleaned up and headed home. It had gotten so dark that we really didn't even know how we'd done, but we were happy to have most of it behind us.

This morning I went over to examine our work and take off the tape. I was very pleased with our un-professional work! I love the colors and was able to easily touch up our mistakes. Almost makes me want to tackle a few more walls....almost.

You've seen the bright teal we have in Julia's room, so now I'll give you a little tour of the rest of the place...

The boys' room! We have the paintings I did for them and also some cool Cars 2 posters to decorate the walls. Though we don't have beds for them yet, they do have their blue quilts and blue curtains that we'll still be using. We're going for a very American look:)

The living room! The lighting was not good for my camera, but Matt and I did this green accent wall together and we'll still be using our same furniture, which has some greens and reds.

The ceiling is really neat. It's a criss-cross pattern and the painters decided to do it the same brown as the wall, which I think turned out pretty cool.

Again, the lighting is bad, but this is the dining area of the kitchen, with the same red as the boys' room.

Matt has a thing for orange so we decided to copy a magazine picture we saw and put it on the wall that our bed goes on in our bedroom.

The color looks very different depending on the light and I really like it!

So there you go! We did it and we are one step closer to moving in. Hopefully getting the final inspection passed tomorrow and moving in right after Thanksgiving!