Busy Bees

Remember back in November when I was gearing up to paint our home? Well, Hopsack was the declared winner, but then I chickened out and we bought 5 gallons of Desert Fortress, which was a shade lighter. It turned out to be too light. We painted one large wall and could barely tell the next morning. But since we had 5 gallons, and we didn't think of taking it back to have it tinted darker until later, we went ahead and used it on the rest of our home. We painted the family room Hopsack. It's still lighter than I had anticipated, but it works well with our dark furniture.

Now that the walls have been painted, I finally got my clock that I bought in 2007 mounted on the wall! Yay! And we got our family pictures up... mostly. The actual group shot is missing because it has to have a fake window photoshopped out of it. But it will be up there soon.

The walls and entertainment center are still pretty empty because it's all so new! We purchased our first real living room furniture last November. We love our couches. I wish we had ordered the wood protection package for the wood furniture, though. It's more distressed now than when we bought it. I don't know what I was thinking. But I still love it.. I'm trying to figure out how to fill the bookshelves in the entertainment center (besides with just books) and what other decorations to put on the walls.

I also repainted our front room to a red I like better (it used to be an orangey-red)...

and carried that color into our kitchen.

{I love it!}

We bought some drapes this week and tried out two kinds of valances with them. Neither one looked good to us. They were too low, and not our style. Now we're looking for some kind of scarf to drape in front of the curtains.

If we can just get the right shade of Winslow White to paint our office door and trim, we'll be set. We've tried 4 different cans of Winslow White to match the wood to the other trim in our home, and none of it is light enough. We tried color matching at Lowe's, but that didn't work, either, and Parker Paint has so far been of no help. Michael will try again with them on Monday. Maybe we should try painting it Churchill Vanilla. I used that color to paint the ceilings of the dining room, front room, and office, and you can't even tell the difference from the other ceilings in our home. It took me awhile to concede that it was a waste of time.

There you have it; a little update of what we've been busy working on these past few months. I can't wait to show you our office when it's all done!