You may recall from my recent post about our new sofas that I wanted to paint our living room because I didn’t think the olive green color we had on the walls really matched the fabric on the new sofas. We took advantage of the long weekend to do the painting. You can see before pictures in the above linked post, though as I pointed out there the light is not great and makes the color look way lighter than it actually was.

Thanks to the suggestion of my friend Erin we wound up going with a Benjamin Moore paint color called Palladian Blue. I took a look at it online after she suggested it and I liked it. Plus their website told me it pairs well with brown and tan and hey guess what color our new couches are. As I had little desire to spend hours staring at just slightly different hues on paint chips trying to figure out which one might look better on my wall, I was sold on using this color.

Though Erin had suggested getting Lowe’s to match the Benjamin Moore paint color for us because it would be cheaper we went ahead and just bought the Benjamin Moore paint because we could get it an Ace Hardware near us rather than driving out to the county to Lowe’s. Plus we like supporting locally owned businesses, which most Ace Hardware stores are.

We talked to the guy at the hardware store about which paint base to buy for awhile. Between the multiple varieties of the store brand and Benjamin Moore brand paint bases I was a bit overwhelmed. It’s slightly insane how many choices there are even just within the Benjamin Moore line. We went with the low level Benjamin Moore paint, which I believe was called Ben in eggshell finish. It has built in primer, which I have never used before and didn’t know how well it would work, but I was happy with what we got.

Saturday morning before we went to a barbecue at some friends’ house we did most of the prep work washing down the walls and putting up the tape. I find the prep work to be the worst part of painting. I’m happy we decided to do it on Saturday though so we could mostly get right into painting on Sunday morning.

Sunday we did have a bit of prep work to do putting out the tarps and moving furniture out the way, but that didn’t take too long. Despite my misgivings about how well the built in primer would work as opposed to a separate primer especially since we were going from a darker color to a lighter color, it worked really well. I’m pretty sure if wanted to we could have got away with only doing one coat, which is pretty amazing. We did a second coat though.

After that we decided to take in a movie while the paint dried instead of sitting around watching the paint dry. We saw World’s End, which I found enjoyable until the end when it completely fell apart. I can’t remember another movie that completely self destructed as much as I thought that one did. It’s like they had no idea how to end it.

Anyway, I’m sure you’re curious as to how the room actually looks now. I’m happy with the way it turned out, though my husband keeps saying it looks weird. It kind of does right now just because it is so much lighter than the old paint color, but we’ll get used to it soon enough and it won’t seem weird anymore. Also, for anyone keeping score at home of the 8 rooms in our house (including bathroom) 5 of them are now painted some shade of blue. Apparently we like blue.

And now here’s some equally bad after pictures to match the before ones. It’s really hard to take a good picture in that room because of the large front window.