Our Main Floor Paint Make Over

This month we tackled our biggest paint job yet – the main living space:  our kitchen, eating nook and living room area.  Painting a main floor is a big job, but so worth the transformation!

We have lived in our home for almost 8 years, and our walls are starting to show quite a bit of wear and tear.   With 3 kids, (2 of which are boys who run every Hot Wheel car and truck into the walls that they can), it was time to give our main floor some much needed care.  So we patched up dents, wiped off grime and got to work!

The fun part of this project was picking out the paint colour!  When we moved in all the walls in our home were painted the same taupe colour, and we enjoyed how it looked for many years, but now we feel like it’s time for a change.  We feel like if we are going to paint, then we might as well make a difference right?  Part of the fun of having your own home is being able to put your design stamp on it.  And it’s important for us that our home reflects us as a family, and that it makes us happy to come home to every day.  And I can honestly say that our house does just that.  It makes us happy to see our yellow front door against freshly painted trim, our sunny office, our serene bedroom, fun kids bathroom, and now our fresh and relaxing main floor.  New paint makes it feel like a new house!  LOVE that.  (I better love it because we plan on staying here for a few more years at least!)

Anyway, let’s have a look at how things were before!

Before:  Here’s the kitchen area.  Nice.  Simple but in need of a colour injection!

Before:  This is the living room area.

Before:  My favourite little view from the kitchen, my linen drawers.  I do have to say I will miss the turquoise curtains a bit.

Once we get started there is no turning back!  I always have this little surge of panic when I see the first roll of colour go on!  Eeek.

I have to give mad props to my ever supportive husband who takes on these house tasks with no complaint at all.  Love him.   🙂

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So now let’s have a look how things are now!   Eeeeeeek this is so exciting!

AFTER

Here’s the colour!  So bright and fresh! We used CIL Paint in Steeplechase, with a satin finish.  On the swatch the colour was a green tone with some grey…no blue.  I kid you not.  There was no blue tinge on that paint chip.

But the weird thing is that the colour looks blue, and it’s not what we were expecting at all.  BUT, we really really love it.  I think it looks blue because of the way that our house faces, and the fact that we don’t get any sun back here.  Because there is no sun there has always been a bluish cast (I especially notice this when I’m trying to take pictures of food for the blog!).

So this is something to note when you’re choosing a colour for your home – really think about the light you do or don’t have because it really affects the colour you choose. I think if we had any sun, the colour would look more true to what it is, which is a sea green.  In some light it looks blue, sometimes it looks grey, and sometimes greenish, but the fact that the colour looks different in different light, is actually what I love about it!

I don’t get stressed about these things and go with the flow.  The colour as it is, is gorgeous and matches everything we have already.  Most importantly it achieved exactly what we had hoped, which was to lighten up our main floor living area.  It’s perfect!

Here’s how it looks in our kitchen.  It makes everything look refreshed, even the cabinets.

It’s especially bright and beautiful in our eating nook area.  We are amazed at how light it is in here now, even at night.

And to warm things up I bought some yellow accents: new chair cushions, tea towels and a floor rug.I love how cheery it is!

I really wanted to lighten things up even more, so I took down our taupe and turquoise curtains and replaced them with white ones.  I put solid sheers in the space where our couch is, and a light patterned sheer in our eating nook.  The light they cast is so soft.

The paint works really well with our fireplace feature wall too.  I especially love how the colour looks against the white shelving.  Love love love!

Our whole main floor is so much brighter and fresh looking – it feels like a new home again which is so nice!

Here’s a quick look at one angle of our living space before and after!  We are really happy with how it turned out!  Painting is instant decorating gratification, with so much impact in a short period of time!  Now what else can we paint….  😉

Have an inspired day!

Disclosure:  CIL Paints provided the paint for this project…so A BIG thank you to CIL for making this room transformation possible!  We are loving our main floor paint make over!