Dining Room in Stages

The dining room was the next room on the list to be tackled in our home renovation/repaint list.  We had decided we wanted to go with a blue, but not sure what what shade.  That actually proved a little challenging, but in the end we got the color we wanted.  We actually took a vote over the fourth of July with the in-laws.

The paint samples are shown left.  We ended up going with the top color, Pale Sky and had planned to do a deep blue (shown on bottom) for the base.  That plan sort of changed along the way.

Rob decided to pick up the Home Depot 1-2-3 Book over that weekend and read that walls should be sanded for a "velvety smooth finish".  We figured what the hell.   We had to patch holes anyway, so off sanding we went.

Of course our ever present supervisors had to oversee this event as well.  One Rob finished up with that portion, I started cutting in the walls.  It's surprising how fast you can paint a room when you are only painting the top two thirds of a wall and have only 3 to paint.

Rob does pretty good at coloring inside the lines.

After the paint went up on the walls, we knew we had really nailed the color.  It also showed us that our initial selection of dark blue on the bottom may have been a little premature.  We decided we actually liked the idea of having a sand color on the bottom half.  We wanted something darker than what was there however to give it some contrast.  After another round of voting we decided on "Pecan  Sandie" for the bottom third.  (As a random aside, I want to work for Behr naming colors)

This picture shows the difference in the colors pretty well.  It also shows ME painting in my lovely hobo clothes.  You got to love your paint outfit.  There's giant holes in the armpits and I have made it a point to get some of every color I paint on that shirt.  You can't see if from this side, but it's quite a grubby looking shirt now.
 

This is the latest picture of the dining room (minus the updated plugs).  Our final step will be to do the trim work.  We bought Ultra Bright White to make the rails pop.  Right now they are some weird version of cream and look kind of crappy.  We also need to scuff up the edges because they painted them in a high gloss of a high glass and it's peeling up in some places to show the awful prior colors beneath it.

Eventually when it's not 3,000 degrees outside, we are going to take down the chandelier and spray it another color.  I hate brass (it reminds me of cheap hotels) so we were thinking to try either a silver or white.  If it looks like crap, we'll be out $15 for spray paint.  We were going to straight up replace the thing, but in the interest of saving $150-$200 we thought spray paint might be a fun experiment first.  There's nothing functionally wrong with it (aside from a bulb being out) so it's hard to justify tossing it because "I don't like the color".  Stay tuned as the next phases come to fruition!