Our renovation has become all-consuming for me and I can think of little else. I woke with a start at 4:00 this morning wondering if our dining room is too small. (Is it? Did we make a mistake? Arrrrgh!)
I had a whole lot of home-related things on my plate yesterday and by the end of the day I was feeling like a wrung-out old sponge.
I did manage to buy light fixtures for our bathroom vanity. I picked them up at the Electrical and Plumbing Store in Bell’s Corners. We’ve purchased a few things here and I’ve always been very happy with the service. The prices are right too.
I managed to fall in love with the last two of these fixtures and so I negotiated a bit of a deal… which was lucky for me. I also bought a shelf/towel holder for our walk-in shower. I’m worried that it might be a bit large for the space. Because of the placement of studs in the wall, the actual shower unit (taps, rain head, and a rail with a handheld shower) is farther away from the far wall than I would have liked, but we’ll see if we can make it work.
The other biggie we accomplished yesterday was regarding paint choices.
The architect and I spent about two hours pouring over a thousand different paint chips from Benjamin Moore. BUT, at least we had a starting point. I picked the colours using one of our favourite paintings from Alison Fowler. The painting will figure prominently in our main living area, so I thought this might be a smart idea.
So yes, paint colour selection. My eyeballs were hurting after awhile and I’m pretty sure I was developing a nervous twitch. It was incredibly challenging for me to narrow it down to something that I thought would suit our space.
I know it doesn’t look like much, but this is what we ended up with:
Not pictured above: this soft grey for the master bedroom and a darker grey for the family bathroom. Also missing from the photo, a shade of turquoise Sarah picked for her room as well as the white of Emma’s bedroom. (Related: did you know Benjamin Moore has a colour-picking app? There’s one for the U.S. and one for Canada. It’s not perfect, but it’s neat. You should check it out.)
Choosing paint colours is not for the weak. It boggles my mind how utterly different colours can look in different light and in different settings.
The blue in the photo above is intended to be for my office and for an accent wall. It looked lighter, greyer and softer in the architect’s office but when I held up that tiny piece of paper up to The Actual Wall I was shocked at how bright it looked. It’s sky blue! Am I brave enough to have a big wall in the middle of my home painted sky blue?
I think this is the crux of it. Paint choice is like a personality test. It takes serious guts to think outside the beige and apply something that is not considered a neutral. I profiled a home for article once in which the family chose to paint their ceiling a very rich dark purple. PURPLE. And it looked incredible. I wish I had the confidence to do something like that. I’m all about picking nice neutrals and maybe livening it up with throw pillows. Gah. How boring. But then again, on the flip side, we DO have to live in this house.
I had a particularly difficult time choosing the greys. Greys are notoriously hard to get right, especially in a bedroom or bathroom. Too much blue and it looks cold and sterile. Too much yellow and you might as well be calling it brown. There’s a good article about it on the HGTV website you might want to check out if you’re interested in this kind of thing.
I just want to curl up in a ball and be done with it today. I’m still so worried that we didn’t get it right and it’s giving me heart palpitations. Yesterday I had pint-sized paint samples mixed from the palette we chose. Each one covers 25 square feet of wall – two coats. I left it at the house with instructions regarding what colour goes where. I guess we’ll see if we got it right soon enough.
What else is new?
- the exterior doors are on – BLACK – and they look fantastic
- the drywall is almost entirely done
- the kitchen is in the works – we saw a sample of our cabinetry and it looks great
- the stucco is being repaired, siding is almost done
- the side porch and garbage enclosure is coming along really well and I’m quite happy with it
- the back deck is dreamy
- interior doors have been chosen and ordered
- the new basement floor has been poured
- trim goes on very soon
