Living Room

I have been wanting to paint the living room since we moved into our house. It was originally olive green, which was fine, just a little too dark for me. The living room and dining room are open to each other and the dining room was originally painted black.

Last week, I decided that I was going to paint the living room. One of my favorite paint colors from our house in Tifton was Pale Gold 2 (Laura Ashley color from Lowe's). I painted the dining room in Atlanta Pale Gold 2, so it seemed natural to paint the living room that same color.

We moved the furniture and covered it with plastic tarps. My painting abilities aren't great enough that I'm comfortable painting without taping the moulding, so we spent a little while with the masking tape. I should say that regular masking tape is cheap, but the blue painter's tape is soooo much easier to remove. I think it's well worth the extra cost.

Because the walls were dark and we were using a light tan paint, we primed the walls. Someone at Home Depot recommended the Zinsser primer when we painted the dining room because we were covering black paint. I think we used Kilz primer when we covered the black paint in the master bedroom. It worked fine and we ended up with an unopened gallon of the Kilz. I planned to use it in the living room since we had it. I got all of my supplies out and was ready to roll (literally), but when I opened the Kilz, it was very runny. No problem. I grabbed my stirring stick, but it just stuck in the solid mass in the bottom of the bucket. Something was obviously wrong, so we loaded it in the car and headed to Lowe's. We were told that it just needed to be shaken, but I wasn't convinced. We returned the Kilz and bought Zinsser.

Priming took a while and we grabbed lunch (at 4 p.m.) while it dried. By the time we began painting, the sun was going down. Our living room doesn't have any overhead lights, so we relied on the foyer and dining room lights, which was a bad idea. We couldn't see much of anything so we grabbed the flash light to "check" for spots that needed a little more paint. When we were satisfied with our product, we cleaned up our mess, showered, and headed to Panahar for supper.

I began removing the tape the next morning and quickly discovered that we were going to need another coat of paint. We hauled out the supplies again and moved and covered the furniture (we moved the furniture back to their proper locations the night before so we could use the living room) and added a second coat of paint. It's better to do it right than be dissatisfied with our room.

We think it looks great and has really brightened the room and made it look bigger.

Before:

This picture makes the olive green look a lot lighter than it is/was.

After:
It's not decorated like I want. Don't judge me!