When we bought our house, several of the rooms desperately needed new paint. But we only had time to paint the living room and one bedroom before moving in, telling ourselves we would gradually finish painting everywhere else. Well, a year and a half later, none of it had been done and we knew it was high time. Nick had a week off of work between Christmas and New Year’s, so we finally scheduled time and got it done.
It’s not so easy to paint with kids around, so they spent a couple days with grandparents and friends while Nick and I painted. But we were also blessed to have a few helpers (family and friends), which made for lighter work and more conversation. I don’t know what we would do without the amazing people in our lives.
The kitchen was probably the worst before painting, with old paint peeling and chipping horribly. It looked like there had been built-in bench seating that had pulled lots of paint off the walls when it was removed. The existing color also wasn’t my favorite (the same color was all over the walls downstairs too).
I decided I wanted to do green walls in the kitchen, but was a little nervous about how it would turn out. I didn’t want it too dark or bold or bright or… wrong for the space. And my husband didn’t want it too light and pastel-y. So we settled on Trailing Vine by Behr, but I was still nervous. It was a really pretty color, but I wasn’t sure it was quite right.
Sure enough, after my husband got the first coat on while I was working downstairs, I walked into the kitchen and cringed a little bit. It felt very… jungly. A bit too bright and bold for my kitchen, in my opinion. I didn’t dislike the color—in fact, we decided to do accent walls in that color in our boys’ bedroom. But as much as I tried to convince myself that it would be fine in the kitchen, I seriously regretted it already. I was afraid I would grow to hate it.
We had bought two cans of the Trailing Vine green but had not even used one full can so far, so the next morning, my husband stopped by Home Depot to see if there was anything they could add to the second can to soften the color a bit. Unfortunately, the man working in the paint department said that it was already so color saturated that anything we added would only make it darker. My heart fell when my husband told me the news. We had already used up our paint budget and I knew this wasn’t a big enough deal to justify wasting a can of perfectly good paint. I thought I was stuck with a jungly green kitchen after all.
But—this kind Home Depot employee must have been feeling generous because he told my husband, “We don’t normally do this, but to make your wife happy, I’ll swap you out for the color she wants.” 😯 I don’t know who this good man is, but I owe him cookies and a hug. He really didn’t have to do that, and although it’s not a huge thing, I felt so humbled and grateful.
So, Nick came home with a can of Behr’s Thai Basil—a lighter and softer green, but still not pastel-y. It has kind of a boho vibe, and I love it.
We had another huge tender mercy (or two) while painting. First off, we had found 3 unopened cans of paint in our storage room that the previous owners had left behind. We were told that they were in the process of remodeling when the husband got a job out of state, so they hadn’t gotten around to repainting before they moved. What was even better was that this paint only required one coat, so we were able to paint everywhere else in the house that needed it with those cans of paint (minus baseboards and trim, which we painted white). And as a bonus, I am really pleased with the color: Valspar’s Revere Pewter—a great neutral greige that lightened things up and looks good with everything. Score!
So although it was a ton of work and took a little longer than I’d hoped (everything does), it was a very successful painting project and I feel so much better in our home.
