Ta Da!

Ok here it is – my newly painted livingroom and diningroom:


The colors are Quixotic Plum and Versatile Gray – otherwise known as deep purple and warm gray but whatever. Love the Sherwin Williams names (btw. how do you get the job of being the guy who names paint colors? ‘cause I would rock at that).

Here’s some more shots (even more on the photoblog) – the morning sun made for some serious light/dark spots – we so need some curtains (more about that later)





So how did we decide to paint our house purple? Well… it was a long process…and you don’t really have to bother reading this paragraph…. basically we started at midnight blue… but I’m not much of a blue person plus blue with gray is a very, very cool-toned palate and it was just too much for our main living area. So then we were on to orange… but we couldn’t get an orange dark enough for our tastes w/o going with a more terracotta color – and that wasn’t working b/c I’m pretty set on a crayola red and crayola yellow kitchen and that doesn’t look good with terracotta at all. Plus that whole warm oranges color palate is kindof starting to go out of style and we plan on having this paint job for a long, long time…Plus the colors we liked were very close to brown and we have so much brown upstairs that it would just be overkill…Plus we really wanted a dark color and the orange just wasn’t getting the job done. and Matt was the one who suggested purple – it has all of the qualities that we liked about the midnight blue but is a much warmer color… so we tried out several and eventually found Quixotic Plum – it’s a very burgundy purple – not what you think when you think Purple which is why I haven’t told anyone the color until I could back it up with some pictures….But in the end…I love it.


Oh yeah and at one point in that whole process we went out and bought a really nice rug to pull colors from – here’s a closeup:


Anyway the room isn’t done-done but the painting is done and that’s really the hard part… Here’s what we still need:

• Curtains – my grandma is all set to make these for us we just need to buy the fabric and tell her what we want… problem is we have no idea what we want… any suggestions? What goes with Plum? Anyone know of any good websites with curtain ideas on them?
• Throw Pillows – I’m so going to learn how to make these and make a ton in all of the colors in the rug… cause right now the couch is really stark:

• Light fixture for dining room – we hate the "chandelier" that came with the house – plastic candle drips are not my thing at all. And we’ve pretty much decided that we want to add the wiring for an overhead lamp instead of running a chord all the way down the wall… anyone know any good electricians? Or good places to buy cool light fixtures? You can really see it’s awfulness in this pic:

• Chairs (pictured above) – the hand-me down blue recliner is going to be replaced and we would like to reupholster the purple chair. It’s really, really old – it came out of my great-grandmother’s house and is literally stuffed with horse-hair… anyone know where/how I can get this done?
• Dining room table – there is no rush on this one because whatever we buy has to a.) have leaves.. there is no point to having a dining room table if you can’t have a huge thanksgiving dinner at it… and b.) be something we will both still love 50 years from now. Because dining room tables live forever – but ‘sok. We can wait on buying one of these until we can afford to get something real nice.
• Dining room chairs – we have 4 chairs from my great-grandmother (they are against the wall in the pics) that we both absolutely love… they need reupholstered, though… eventually.
• Stuff for the walls – we have nothing right now… but this will come with time.

So yeah… that’s my house…

Dexter is happy everything is back together – and even happier that we have no curtains right now:


And I’m happy with how nice my yellow flowers look with the purple walls:

Yeah for finished painting projects! Now I can get back to knitting!