Heh. Yes, I will be the hostess with the mostest. . . paint and brushes and sandpaper!! Come on by, scrape some walls, assemble some furniture, and I’ll feed and entertain you! Woohoo!

My back is feeling a bit better because I’m doing my PT exercises, so I’m rarin’ to go. We have two rooms that are nearly empty, my favorite kind to paint. This poor guy puts in the floor yesterday, and within minutes, we have paint samples spread out all over, then taped to the wall, then we all start scraping the icky paint off, making a mess on this stuff he worked his butt off to put down. . .but wait ’til you see.

The idea starts with the colors and goes from there. Unfortunately, our big oriental rug won’t match what we chose for the living/dining room, so I have no idea what we’re going to do with it. However, we played and played, and came up with a way to transition the colors from room to room, bringing one into the next room at a time, and it’s like a strategy game. I love it. Plus, a couple of years ago, I picked up a silk sari. Well, the fabric for it. I bargained the owner down to $100 for it, one of the highest prices I’ve ever paid for a fabric, but I had to have it. Well, it’s orange, shot with gold, and the background iridescent thread in the weave is turquoise. It’s going to be curtains in the orange bedroom. And now I know that we’ll be looking for turquoise-y colors in rugs and bedspreads and such, not browns or greens. I’m very excited, indeed.

We have large paint chips for the colors we’re going to use, and paint stirrers with the colors we’ve already painted, and we’re off to IKEA and Jersey Gardens. Later, I will go to K-Mart and buy crappy clothes for painting. I usually use stuff I already have, but I’ve done so much painting in them that they can stand up on their own. The pressure’s on, everyone, so I’m issuing an open invitation to come down and help me paint. No beer until after everything’s cleaned up, though. I learned that one from painting parties back in college. Heh.

With all the furniture out, and the floors down, hubby and I started talking color for the livingroom and diningroom. Unfortunately, since the water damage in that area wasn’t limited to the floor, we knew that it would mean serious prep work. There were plenty of places where the dampness had cracked the paint, and I’m going to have to sand the walls down anyway because the paint has a texture. It’s a good thing we started scraping, though, because all this paint would have come off on the rollers of new color if we hadn’t:

Now, the house is less than 40 years old, so the walls don’t talk a heck of a lot, but what they’re saying to me here is “Who needs an exterminator when you have texture paint?!?”

Sorry it’s so huge, but hubby believes these are inoccuous bubbles in the joint compound. They look way too much like bug tunnels to me, especially with all the little brown specks inside ’em. What do you all think?

I threw my back out Monday, just in time for all the furniture moving. We managed by carefully planning what I would move or not move and enlisting the kids. The laminate is all down in the living/dining room, and the installer is working on the edges and joints. The bedroom comes next. It looks so beautiful!

Now, all our furniture except the dining table is from IKEA, and in the birch finish. However, the stand for the fish tank didn’t come in a choice of finishes, and the credenza was bought a looooong time ago. The table is from Crate and Barrel, and even though it’s a dark brown/black finish, it looks really good with everything else. So I had this idea to pick a paint color that was as close as possible to the table finish and paint the tank stand and credenza. They’re next to each other, but not directly in sight of the table, so close was what we were aiming for. Found a swatch at Benjamin Moore (my fave paint store – if you want really deep and/or saturated colors, they’re the place to go) and got a gallon. Started to paint, carefully protecting my back, and the color looked. . .purple. Well, you know, most black tints are made with varying amounts of blue and purple, and I knew it would dry darker, but dayum! This is undeniably purple, a teeny smidge browner than eggplant. I LIKE it! It’s dry now, and you really don’t see it as purple except in sunlight and against the orange bedroom walls, which is why it won’t be painted on anything in the bedroom, but somehow just knowing that it’s really purple makes me happy.

By the way, the lovely green in the background is the color we chose for the art studio. We still have to sand and prime before the whole room looks like this, but it’ll happen.