We Have Achieved a Pink Living Room

Well, the flu did get me, and then we painted our living room pink.  It's nice to be back on the blog!

 

 

Around the time Genevieve was born, we painted the living room a mushroom color, which I chose because it was between brown and gray and might go with anything.  It did look nice with the creamy trim and the stone fireplace.  My  husband and I figured we'd get a vision for the living room sooner or later.

Then we got our twin red sofas and I sewed chartreuse drapes.  The mushroom walls did not assist the aura of the room, you know?  We wanted a wall color that played nicely with the drapes and kept the focus on the red sofas.  Pink!  Very pale pink, like the inside a seashell.

My husband and I, with help from friends and family, have done all our own painting over the years on our fixer-upper.  We save our home-repair dollars for the projects we don't have the expertise for.

But there was a lot of choreographing to get this room painted, let me tell you.  We arranged babysitting part of the time.  I made sure the freezer was stocked with easy food to keep our morale up and dinner for our Sunday guests.  I made a list of every task that needed to be done, what day it needed to be done on, and possibly how long that task might take.  The idea was to have the children around as little wet paint as possible, and to have the room torn apart for 2 days only.

We did it.

We're exhausted. 

The living room looks fabulous. 

But I must say, as we applied the first coat of paint (Benjamin Moore's "Gentle Blush"), the living room looked scarily pink, like a little girl's nursery. We were dismayed, but we painted doggedly on and reminded ourselves how rigorously we had chosen our color. Amazingly enough, once the dropcloths were put away and the furniture and drapes were back in place, the pink settled down into the background where we wanted it.

We were only planning to touch up the trim, but our standard trim color (Benjamin Moore's Navajo White) suddenly looked sickly green next to the pink; we wanted creamy white.  So I made an emergency trip to our paint store, got their expert help, and we painted the living room trim Mascarpone.  Much better.