A couple of weeks ago when I planned to do a post with some frequently asked questions, I wanted to include a section for all of the paint colors we’ve used in our house. Mike ended up taking over the post for me when I fell asleep, answering his own version of our FAQs. Since the #1 question I am asked is what paint colors we’ve used in various rooms, I figured it was about time the question received it’s own post!

Here are all of our current paint colors displayed together. Some observations…

1. I never realized how well all of our house colors blend together. Since I didn’t really have the whole house in mind when choosing colors, I’m surprised that they all work well! I especially thought the dark gray was bolder and less expected, but even that blends in well.

2. The two middle colors on the top and bottom rows do not look that similar in real life. Or maybe they do? Mike says they do. I think the top color is more brown based and the bottom one is more of a true gray. At least I’m consistent in my choices 🙂

Here is our color breakdown, by room.

Family Room & Kitchen:

Wedgewood Gray

Benjamin Moore HC-146

Entryway & Upstairs Hallway:

Himalayan Trek

Benjamin Moore 1542

Living Room & Dining Room:

Waynesboro Taupe

Benjamin Moore 1544

Office:

Light Stripe- Gray Ghost

Olympic D17-2

Dark Stripe- Silver Fox

Benjamin Moore 2108-50

(we color matched the dark stripe to Olympic, but it is nearly identical to Olympic’s Silver Dollar D17-3)

Powder Room:

Cracked Slate

Olympic D44-5

You’ll notice that our recent paint projects have been done with Olympic’s no VOC paint. We try to keep things as toxin free as possible around here since Macky has seizures and we don’t want any unnecessary triggers. Plus those smells just aren’t good for anyone 🙁 The Benjamin Moore paints we used were for rooms we had professionally painted before we moved in so Macky wasn’t exposed to those fumes (we couldn’t paint our two story entryway on our own so we hired it out).

I hope this post answers all of your paint questions in one spot. I plan to update it as we paint more rooms down the road. I’ll also add this post to our top navigation bar for easy access 🙂

Remember that dramatic painting we did for office 1.0?  And remember when Rebecca mentioned we might be taking the office upstairs once we have children 5 years from now?  Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about that room lately mainly because office 1.0 isn’t entirely functional.  It’s not the organizing-super-productive-making office we thought it would be.

Now, I’ll never paint stripes again.  (Right.  I once said I would never paint ever again, period.)  But the one thing I do love about office 1.0 are those paint stripes. Every time I walk in here, I’m still sucked in by those dramatic stripes.

So how can we do this for office 2.0?  No, no, no more stripes for me.   But instead, let me take you back a few weeks ago.  Remember when we said we wanted some lyric wall art for the dining room?

(via First Time Fancy)

Why not do this for office 2.0?  But in more of an office 1.0 dramatic way?

Imagine, if you will, that the image below is the wall that I’ll work off of.  Blank empty space, all we did was paint it a dark gray (thanks photoshop!).

Nothing special, I know.  But what if we did something big?  Like snakes on a mother-f’n plane big?

Being that we’re all about lyrics, why not put some on the wall?  I’m talking huge, though.  Like span the entire wall huge.

I’m not sure of the typography or spacing that we’ll need and want, but what I do know is that this thing has to be dramatic.  But not so dramatic that we’ll grow tired of it.  Because honestly, I’m not painting office 2.0 again.  Unless of course I can just use the paint-bucket tool.

Oh, look what I did there!

I know once we do move forward with this project, it will take us a year to decide on the lyrics.  I know I want something inspirational, but nothing too corny.  It needs to be something that I want to look at every day.

Without googling, mad props to whoever names the lyrics above.  They’re mad easy, yo.  

Remember back when we painted our office stripes? I last left you with the office looking like this…

Months later, we haven’t done anything else to this room. I lost steam, inspiration and I was no longer excited about it. Mike and I always planned for this to be a temporary office, as we always thought that when we have kids, we’d make it a playroom. Which is why we bought some Ikea desks instead of going with the built-ins we priced out at Lowe’s back in the fall. The past few months we’ve found ourselves saying things like “someday when we move the office”, or “in our dream office we can do x, y, z”. Usually, the office looks like this…

We have (okay Mike has) a lot of hardware that needs a home. Those boxes are full of parts that he’s putting together to give us some additional storage space for pictures, etc. This room has no closet. This is a problem, especially since this room is pretty much in our entryway.

Last week we finally admitted that this office was not working for either of us. It’s not my dreamy, crafty, inspiration filled space and it’s not ideal for Mike either, who wants a desk that doesn’t connect to mine and a wall to write some notes on. We realized it was idiotic for us to continue to work in this space if it’s not well, working for us, just because it’s called the office on the floor plan. Especially when we have 3 spare bedrooms that are not being used!

Cue the future office!

This is our largest spare bedroom. It’s still rocking the builder grade carpet and white walls. In fact, it doesn’t even have a light fixture yet.

But it does have a small walk-in closet for some much needed storage (which is currently housing just my wedding dress and some spare bedding..)

Printer, computer parts, random stuff that I don’t know what purpose it serves can live in here. Our current office has no closed storage, so this will be a nice change.

One other thing Mike and I decided we wanted is our own walls. While it looks pretty and sleek when desks are one piece or along the same wall, it’s not going to work for us. We have two completely different sets of needs and this room is large enough to handle a desk on each wall.

Probably Mike’s side…

And my side…

This room also has something else, a little pond view 🙂

We had an awesome pond view for a good 6 months until they built the house across the street from us. Sidenote: the other name I considered for this blog was Across The Pond, which thankfully I didn’t choose because a blog by that name already exists! 🙂

We don’t have any concrete plans yet and we have only just begun to look around for ideas. We’ll probably move our current furniture up there in the next couple of months and feel it out. We really have no concept of the size of the room since there is currently nothing in it, so we’re not sure where we can put bookcases and a seating area (which we definitely want!)

One idea I stumbled upon while reading Made By Girl was this built-in shelving/bench area from Jenny of Anything Pretty…

(via Anything Pretty)

Don’t see the shelves? Hold on there’s a close-up!

(via Anything Pretty)

The bench also has storage, how genius! This would fit in perfectly with this spare room and would provide us with some much needed storage. I’m not sure if I’d want to do the curtains since this will be an office, but we shall see. I’ve been looking for a room to do these built-ins I pinned on Pinterest a while ago, so it’s nice to see how I can accomodate two windows!

(via Pinterest, original link is broken :()

Don’t worry, we will never, ever paint over our office stripes. In fact, we hope to do them more justice by getting some furniture out of that cramped room because we love them that much. Like I said before, we don’t have any serious plans but we have plenty of time to think this out. It is not easy to design a space for 2 different people with different needs. Rather than meeting in the middle and having us both settle, this time we want to make sure we both get exactly what we want. And that is going to take some time and some long hard thinking…

ps- We were not spared from the wrath of yesterday’s east coast earthquake. One of our Ikea frames did not make it out alive 🙁

At this point in my short blogging life, I have uploaded over 1,400 pictures to this thing. With nearly 200 posts, I’m beginning to forget what I’ve written about, what I’ve photographed and what pictures never actually made it to the computer. Yes, my memory cards are currently housing something like 8,000 pictures. I’ve heard many people who maintain blogs say this and I shall repeat, the picture part is the most time consuming. For every one picture you need to post, you take like 10-15 and choose the best one.

Since I am a weekend warrior, sometimes I am so inspired on Saturdays that I take a million pictures and think of a million blog topics. Then Monday hits, as well as “real life” and sometimes I just don’t have the energy and can’t even remember what I was planning to say. The short summary to all of this rambling? Sometimes my projects fall through the cracks.

Back in March/April when we were working on the office full steam, I took on a little project that I forgot to tell you about. It involves this guy.

Yes there are two different sizes of gumballs in there. When we replenished the stash we bought the wrong size. Whoops. But anyway, we received this amazing gift from Mike’s brother and his wife about 5 years ago. We love the the novelty and unexpectedness of it. I have always adored gumball machines, especially the giant one from Family Double Dare in the early 90s. Remember? No? It’s okay I found a picture!

(via)

Everytime I see Mark Somers on the Food Network it just feels wrong. Also in the 90s, way back when I was in elementary school, I remember seeing a girl who was dressed as a gumball machine for Halloween. I was so jealous because it was obviously the coolest costume out there. It looked like this, but with balloons for gumballs…

(via)

Some girls aspire to wear lingerie and animal ears, I aim for a garbage bag and a sheet. I think that explains a lot…

While we loved our gumball machine, we thought that it was time to give him a makeover. So I (very nervously) disassembled him.

Taped off his important parts…

Then I sprayed him. I sprayed him bright green…

I understand that he is likely not food safe at this point. We never really ate the gumballs from him anyway. I imagined a green machine with bright white gumballs. He took a while to dry and when I removed the tape, I discovered a little mishap.

My taping missed a few spots around the metal (the red on the plastic piece where the gum comes out is actually printed there). I planned to touch this up with some acrylic paint in the closest match possible. I knew I could never spray it any closer than I did!

It seemed genius, perfect. And then I put it in the office.

Not so bad, but then I stepped away.

And away some more.

Then Mike and I declared this project a flop. Maybe not a full and complete flop, but we don’t like it. The green is too John Deere, which is funny because they sell John Deere spray paint and I purposely avoided it. With the addition of our white chairs, we decided another pop of white in this little corner would be perfect. Actually I think I sprayed this the same day we bought our chairs, so yes, it took me nearly 4 months to post my failure. Not because I was keeping it secret, but because I wanted to report on a final product before posting.

I bought some high gloss white spray paint soon after this mishap, but then life got crazy and the last few months have been a blur of coffee, textbooks and Pinterest. The office still looks exactly as it did in the pictures above, but maybe I need to conquer a small project to satisfy my painting itch. Can of white spray paint? I’m coming for you.

That is of course, after I pull the 4 foot weed in my front yard. Yes neighbors, we still live here….

…Wait do my neighbors read this? Hello, is that you guys? Yes, this IS why I stand in the yard with a camera and run away when you spot me!

Tonight I handed in a midterm that took me most of last week to complete. We had to work in just two 48 hour blocks of time, so I spent way too many hours sitting at a desk last week. Thankfully, I now have a pretty home office to enjoy 🙂

I am so thankful we decided to get extra long desks, for when I have to do this.

You see that? A laptop, an open book, an open giant binder, room to write, a closed book and loads of open space!

I also realized that I never shared when I bought this West Elm bathroom cup to use as my mostly Sharpie, pencil holder.

The office isn’t finished yet, we still have lots of little details and storage to add. But it works wonderfully, and I can attest from hours and hours on my arse that the chairs are super comfy. We will probably add finishing touches to this room gradually, since we are currently hooked on this monster.

This was my view from sitting at my desk. Two weekends ago, we managed to prime the lower half of the walls. We decided to paint the lower half before adding the picture frame part of the molding, so that we can just easily roll paint on without worrying about nooks and crannies right now. Looking at this for hours had me itching to get some semi-gloss paint up there! Maybe my carpal tunnel will heal and we can get at least the downstairs done soon!