Painting the House

Due to some unforeseeable timing issues, all of our painting plans had to be expedited a bit, in order to get everything done in time to move into our house at the end of this month. 

This was the week for the brick masons to start taking down and rebuilding the fireplace, the week that Simon and our contractor would be putting up a beam in the kitchen, and now, the week for painting the house.  

Needless to say, we have a lot going on.

Thankfully, we also have a lot of really spectacular friends.

Because of the age of the house, and the style differences between us and the previous residents, we made the decision to paint the entire house from ceiling to baseboard.  I  think it will have the most powerful effect on making the house look fresh, and feel like our own. 

Up until now, we have done a lot of demolition, cleaning, scraping, and undoing yucky things from the past owners. But now is the chance to finally pull something back in order. Only working in the house on the weekends has really made it easy to not get burnt out on the renovations.

It also means, however, that the pace seems slow. 

Every week we go back and it seems as though the messy house we have taken apart is still the same messy house we started with.   Despite all of the work that we put in, despite all of the money we have spent on materials and tools, it just seems like it's in a constant state of disarray. Painting seems to be the first step to completing a project. Of course, all of the demolition and undoing is for a good cause, and in the end will come together for a great effect. But we are in the phase right now of plastic draped floors, no light fixtures, and messy everything. 

While I have been incredibly excited about finally getting some paint up on the walls, picking out paint for every room in the house, when you've never had a house of your own to paint, can be a little overwhelming.  I made a lot of friends at Home Depot while talking myself through most of the color choices.  But, after lots of Pinterest browsing for paint colors that I liked and an embarrassingly long time in various hardware stores, the paint was decided upon, the supplies was purchased, and painting weekend was begun.

What I thought would be a day of hard work with various helpers in and out over the course of the day, turned out to be a lot of hard work and a rockstar group of friends who stayed an entire Saturday getting dusty and painty to get our house in order. Seriously, between prepping the ceilings and walls, taping off where we needed to, painting the ceilings, and painting the walls (not to mention trim work) I cannot even imagine where we would be if we had done it just the two of us.  Instead though, we got an incredible amount of work done and the house is really starting to take shape! I am so thankful for wonderful friends willing to sacrifice their weekend to put in some hard work with us. They have been a huge blessing through this whole process and I don't know where we would be without them.