Bye-bye, Pink walls!

When we moved into our house on March 30, the entire first floor was covered with pink carpets and pink walls. Everywhere we looked, we saw pink.

Over the next two weeks, we ripped out the carpet (and everything that lived underneath it) and had our hardwood floors refinished. On the weekend of April 14-15, it was finally time to say goodbye to the pink walls.



We spent almost three hours covering every inch of our new floors with plastic, and pasting the walls with two coats of primer.



Finally, it was time for what Ariella calls the "Trading Spaces" moment: revealing the new color.



We chose a color called "Stillwater" for the main wall in the living room, as well as the back wall of the staircase, and the hallway upstairs. It's an antique-looking blue with a lot of gray in it.





We thought that this particular shade of blue is the type of color you would see on a Victorian like ours back in 1908, when our house was the new houses on the street. The color let us be respectful of the Victorian architecture and style, but also let us decorate our home in a way that still has a contemporay spin.





Thanks to some clever ladder-work, we were able to paint the entire stairwell easily. (For the record, no overly-nervous mothers -- who shall remain nameless -- were consulted before this process took place.)



For the rest of walls in the living room and dining room, we chose a neutral tan color called "Oakwood Manor". I have no idea where "Oakwood Manor" got its name, but I'm guessing the people who live there have tan walls too.

For the beam that separates the living room from the "parlor" (as well as a couple of other nooks around the house), we chose a color called "Twilight Gold" that's a subtle shade different from Oakwood Manor. The combination of the two colors gives the room a complementary color technique like you would see on some of the old "Painted Lady" Victorians.









With the new paint and new floors, we feel like we've put a lot of "Victorian" back in our old Victorian, while still giving ourselves a space that feels like home.

We've still got a lot of work to do on the house (we haven't done anything on the acre of land OUTSIDE the house yet). But we're finally ready to go to Boston to get our furniture and settle in.