New Living Room Color

One of my 2013 goals for the home was to freshen up the living room to make it a little  more modern and a little less traditional. In my mind, the first step was to lighten and brighten the color. Here is what the living room was looking like before I changed the paint.

There are a lot of things I really like about the colors. I actually really dig the red. It was already that color when we moved into the house, and I didn’t think that it was something that I would keep, but what do you know, three years later I love it! It really gels with the colors of our artwork and furniture we have in the room. By someone else painting it that bright, saturated red, it forced me to embrace a big bang of color. So the red stays. The problem was the tan. The previous owners had also painted the living room and hallway this tan. It wasn’t bad, but it was a badly done paint job. There were thin spots, previous owner picture holes, and it just looked sloppy. Unfortunately, the previous owners didn’t leave this paint behind (or even a name), so for the last three years I have just ignored it. I decided it was time to fix it, not ignore. Since I had painted the kitchen a nice blushy tan, I thought it would be a great idea to paint the tan walls in the living room and hallway the same tan as the kitchen. I thought it would tie the two rooms together, make it feel more unified, and even bigger. Plus, it would fix the thin spots and old, unspackled holes.

The first step was painting all the trim in the room, including the fireplace and bay window plus all the doors and trim. These had also been in great need of painting, since they were all painted in matte white (I like semi-gloss) and they were thin coats too. The fireplace has had this terribly white blotchy look for too long. Although I severely dislike painting trim, I was so happy to get this done. It’s not picture worthy (you can’t tell that I actually repainted the white in pictures) but in person it is just so much crisper. So once the trim dried, it was time to get my paint on. I did two coats of Valspar’s Riviera Dune in semi-gloss. Since it is a tan going on a tan, I thought I would give you a process shot to show you the difference in color.

In this picture you can see the old wall color (the left) compared to the new wall color (the right). This was a two weekend project so I did half one weekend and the other half this past weekend. Hence the two completely different walls.

Once it is all painted, all thoughts of the other color are washed away and you don’t realize it ever used to be another tan. But Eric and I know, and we love it!

So there it is, a fresher, brighter living room now free of thinning paint and old picture holes. Thank goodness!