I can’t believe I forgot to give this post a title! Sorry!

I want to tell you about my latest home decorating project. I had mentioned before how my sister the artist drew some portraits of my kids for my Christmas gift. Well, after I got them all framed up, they just looked too washed out against our off white walls, so I decided I needed to paint. I had also bought myself this mirror for my birthday, and realized it would rather sit on a wall that wasn’t white, too.

Since Ryan had Friday off, he said he would help me paint if I would buy the paint. You don’t have to tell me more than once. I immediately went to Wal Mart to buy paint. I wasn’t exactly sure what color I wanted, but I knew it would be in the brown or gold family. I picked up about three different swatch colors and in five minutes had decided on a color. It’s called February Gold.

I actually liked the darkest color on the card, but I heard somewhere that you are supposed to go one shade darker than you actually want. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I did that, and ended up with this gold color.

With a little help from my number one helper, I got to work painting. Lucky for me, he had school that day, so I did the bulk of the paint job after he left for school, and by the time he got back, it was done. Ryan did the top edges with the cool edger thing, and I did the walls with the cool roller thing that sucks the paint into the handle.

It really makes painting go a lot faster, and there’s less drips and spills than using a roller and a tray (and no, they didn’t send me one to use and try out and review here, I just like it). I does, however, use a lot of paint. I used a whole gallon of paint on just two walls of that room.

Anyway, By the time the kids got home from school, I was pretty much done with the painting for the day, and the room looked kind of like this.

I was feeling pretty good about the paint job and the color until the kids came home.
“WoW! Yellow walls!” they said.
“That’s gold,” I told them.
“Huh. It looks kind of like yellow to me.”
“Gold. See the sample? February Gold.” I said.
I guess they knew enough not to mess with me, because they called it gold from then on. Good children.

Saturday I did some touch ups, then called on some friends to help me figure out how to arrange my pictures. The sad thing was, that with the new mirror, none of my old “country” decor worked anymore. We stole a few things from another room, and decided that if I painted them all black they could work. But nothing got hung up quite yet.

Monday a friend happened to be coming over. A friend with a background in design. What’s the point of having a designer friend if you can’t ask them design questions? My point exactly. He gave me some different ideas that I really liked.

Tuesday found me spray painting a frame, a shelf and a chair black. I like spray paint! Tuesday Ryan also hung the pictures of the kids. I love them! Unfortunately, with the glass over them and the light from the windows and flash, I haven’t been able to get a good picture. I should have scanned them before I framed them (and actually, I tried to, but for some reason it only gave me 1/2 a picture. Hmmm). So, here’s how they look on the wall, but you can’t really see how wonderful they are from these pictures. You’ll just have to come over and see them in person.

Aren’t they great? This is actually the fourth set of drawings my sister has done for me. She give to me for Christmas every three years, and this is always what I want. If you are interested in having her draw pictures of YOUR kids, you could always contact her through me. She’s quite talented.

Here’s that wall finished.

Then I had to get busy on hanging the mirror and everything on the other wall. I had measured things out on the floor and got impatient and didn’t want to wait for when Ryan could help me, so on Friday I just did it. First I got the mirror up on the wall in the general place I wanted it.
Then I put the frame below it, the family picture to the side, and the shelf below that. It looked like this.

I looked around the house for things to put on that little black shelf, and found the ‘imagine’ sign in my kitchen and tried it out. It looked great, in my opinion.

So, there’s that wall of the room. It turned out quite nice, don’t you think? Last night, after I got it all arranged and took all the stray toys out of there, I just sat in there and read my book. Alone. Each time a child would come in, I would say, “Hey, don’t bring your stuff in here!” and they would slink out. I guess that’s what I’ve got to do to keep a room clean around here.