part 1: a painted turtle, manhattan mist & teepee brown weekend

It really is amazing how a fresh coat of paint can make a room feel completely different and totally updated. We learned that this weekend several times over and thankfully had the help of both our wonderful families so the work went amazingly quickly. We had lofty goals to paint the office, front room and kitchen/den area as well as sand/paint all of the cabinets in the kitchen. So we invited my parents, Jim and Cinda, Aunt Jill and my precious cousin Kelly in town to help us.

Friday, October 7:
Jim, Cinda and Ryan got started Friday afternoon and did the hugely helpful (and least fun part) of taping the office and taking off all of the cabinets, drawers and pulls. Here is our naked kitchen...

Yes... all that stuff in the cabinets is stuff they left (after we gave tons away at our empty house party)

We also decided that we did not like the one randomly textured wall in our den. So, for a very reasonable price, we had D & M Painting out to remove and retexture the wall. (A venture we briefly considered attempting ourselves until Mack at Home Depot basically told us there was no way we could do it well). Fine with us, it definitely was something to be left to the pros, and pros they were. They spent about an hour on Friday night removing the bad texture and adding the first layer of putty type stuff (the technical term) to smooth it out. Amazingly, they managed to keep the mess impressively small.

Bye, bye weird random fan type texture

This is the puttying I referred to above

After that, they came back Sunday and did a quick second smoothing layer of putty and added the standard texture that all of the other walls in the room have.

Adding the texture

And voila! a brand new wall that fits much better with the rest of the space!

But, I'm getting ahead of myself, back to Friday night. By the time I got off work we were ready to paint. With the four of us in the office things went very quickly...

... and in no time we went from periwinkle colored little girl's room to the more sophisticated Manhattan Mist for our office. We love the color, it is neutral and keeps the pretty small space feeling roomy.

This is only one coat in, but you get it idea. It really looks great!

After we wrapped things up in the office we got straight to work in the kitchen/den area. As it was already taped off for the most part we were able to get a lot done on our first coat of Painted Turtle (by the way, we used Behr Premium Ultra from Home Depot in all the rooms and loved it! Kind of on the pricey-er end, but from what we hear definitely worth it in the long run. And all of the Home Depot paint guys were so friendly and helpful!)

Let the cutting begin

I have to admit, I was a bit apprehensive about this color... it is pretty dark and the sample we painted looked too "army green" to me. Ryan really loved it though, so we went with it. Luckily, the more we painted the more I really began to LOVE the color! The space is big with plenty of natural light so the darkness isn't really a factor and the blueish undertone really came out when it was on a larger scale (also I think the satin sheen we picked, as opposed to the flat sheen the sample was, helped a lot).

Painted Turtle coat 1 complete!

Finally, we did a bit of prep work for the next day. We wanted to get the taping, removing of screws/nails and filling in the holes out of the way so that we could all get down to business Saturday morning. We were... mostly successful in this venture....

Yes, we are still only on Friday night and thus far the count is - Office: coat 1 done, Kitchen/Den: coat 1 done, Cabinets: removed and sanded. Muy impressivo!

Saturday coming soon...