Interior Painting Updates

Alright, folks! I talked briefly about the living room plans in my 2018 Project List blog post so click over to read the intro because we are making some progress!

The living area is the center of our home and is what you see when you come into the main entry. It’s a large and open space, is two-stories-high and has a tall fireplace focal point. When we moved into the house, the walls and ceiling were in need of a painting and with 24′ ceilings, we knew that job would be expensive to hire out and a doozy to do ourselves. If you guys follow me on Instagram, you may have seen we finally tackled the daunting job of painting the ceiling a couple weeks ago. We rented a scissor lift and did it ourselves. We saved about $5k doing it ourselves and after painting the exterior of our house (a very intense undertaking), we’re basically pros. Since we’d have a lift for the weekend, we made a to-do list of everything we wanted to accomplish to maximize the rental. We planned to paint the ceiling, paint the top out-of-reach areas of the walls, re-paint the fireplace white (more on that later), replace the super cheesy gold recessed lights and replace the ceiling fans with our new chandeliers. Needless to say, the list was a little ambitious and we didn’t get it all done but we’re definitely making progress.

Here’s what the living area looked like when we first closed on the house, although since then we had new wood floors installed, did a lot of painting and removed all of the staircase railings.

Here’s the deal on the fireplace: I hate it. The river rock is far from my dream fireplace masonry. It’s bubbly and I hate the look of it – and the tree trunk mantle. But it’s going to be a while before we get around to refacing the fireplace. There are so many other projects that take priority and the fireplace is functional so there’s nothing really wrong with it, other than it being hideous.  Shortly after moving in I decided to paint the fireplace hoping it would make it a little less stressful to look at. I went with black to match our interior doors, and while it helped (a little),  after installing our dark wood floors it was just too dark. So I knew one day when we got around to painting the ceiling we would probably repaint it. And that we did.

To keep things easy, we painted the ceiling and fireplace the same color as the walls, Sherwin Williams Alabaster. It’s a creamy white.

As always, the prep work alone took forever. We had to paper off every little nook and cranny because the paint dust struggle is real. It took me 2.5 days to clean up after we finished painting.

Here’s our handy little scissor lift rental. This thing was a blessing and a curse. Getting it inside was a miracle in itself (you can see it BARELY fit through the door) but then up and down the 2 steps we have in our living room was a whole other story.

Here you can see the ceiling and old wall color compared to the white. And if you look closely you can see the diva gold recessed lights.

Here’s hubby removing the ceiling fans while I did the happy dance. Those things have been such an eyesore since we moved in and getting them down was liberating. The new chandeliers (which I’m keeping a surprise) will hang in place of these fans, but higher.

So here’s what the fireplace looks like now. Brighter for sure, but I still despise the river rock.

In other news, I FINALLY got hubby to agree to remove the pony wall that surrounds the living room. I want to remove it and extend the steps that we have down into the living area from the foyer and hallways. After I got him onboard, I immediately took a hammer to the drywall to see what it looks like and get some insight into how difficult removal will be. It’s framed out so that’s easy but the unfortunate part is the slab of the upper level extends to where the first step down needs to be. So we’ll have to demo some concrete which will be messy and difficult, then we’ll have to fill it back in to create a flat surface for the wood floor. That’s all for another day. Hah.

Would ya look at that mess? I think out of the nearly 15 gallons of paint we used there are a few gallons just on the floor!

Did you know when you walk on paint dust it forms clumps? The bottom of our shoes and even Java’s paws had clumps of white paint. 😉 That doggie is living the fixer-upper life right alongside us!

We have to rent the scissor lift again to install the chandeliers and put in the last few recessed lights since we couldn’t finish it all in one weekend, but we finally have walls that are all one color so there’s that! 😉 I also ordered a new rug for the living room so I’ll share more on the plans for that room soon but you can read a little about it in my 2018 Project List post.