Painting the Whole World Pea Soup Green... One Room at a Time

This week while I was at work Chris finished painting the main part of the kitchen.


It was not supposed to be this color. The color is called suede, it's supposed to be a yellow toned medium brown color. Looks like pea soup to me. Now nearly every room in the house is green.

Then, today we painted the island:
The color is library pewter. Looks kind of like olive green, right? We freaked out after the first coat thinking that we were being sabotaged by the kid at Sherwin Williams, but the second coat looks much more pewter-ish. Of course, we picked the pewter color to match what we thought the suede color was going to be. For once I didn't do anything rash and we are going to wait until the room is finished before thinking about repainting anything.

We also installed some new switch plate covers and drawer hardware. If you stand in front of the hole and look at the kitchen it looks like it's nearing completion, but then you turn around and see this:

Yikes.

Dining Room Redux... Part 2

When we first moved in, the dining room was painted Ruskin Room Green, and it's a nice color, but under the light of that room it turned into this yellowy, limey color and I didn't like it. So, I painted it red. Rembrandt Ruby. This has always worked for me in the past, red always works for me. We left the frieze alone because we planned to paper it and the ceiling. The problem with the red was that it made the woodwork and the furniture disappear.


When we bought this giant china cabinet, we didn't want it to blend in with the walls or make the room even darker. I am the first one to say that I like dark spaces, but this wasn't quite right, so we painted it again. This time Chris chose the palette and I think it worked out great. Oddly enough, we used the original room color above the plate rail, so we have kind of come full circle. With the new wall colors, the Ruskin Room Green is a much different color. The yellowy tone now looks golden and lovely. The walls and ceiling are also from the Sherwin Williams historical color palette, the walls are Buckram Binding and the ceiling is Indian White.

Chris installed the new chandelier last autumn while I was visiting my brother. A very nice surprise.


I am hoping one day to build a built-in china cabinet for this space, but that could be many years away. In the interim we still need storage, and it so happens that the makers of this fine quartersawn china and buffet are shutting down their furniture division, so we got it for a song. I am so happy to have a place for everything, now we can get started on the kitchen...

New Paint

Since we realized that we had no hope of affording to have the exterior re-stuccoed, we decided to have the shingles painted instead and pretend that it was stucco. We (I) chose a color from the Sherwin Williams Arts & Crafts historic color pallette called Roycroft Brass. I am so happy with the results, but we haven't heard any comments from the neighbors. Not one comment and it's been painted for more than 6 months. I am guessing they're not so happy with the one pea-soup colored house in a sea of white houses. Oh well...