In which I bore you with a LOT of pictures and entirely too much detail

By now you'd think I'd know never to say "I'll have pictures up tomorrow!" because it almost never happens. Sometimes it's because I take the pictures and just don't get around to processing* and posting them in a timely fashion, or it's because I get really busy with something and don't have a chance to even take pictures, let alone process and post them...I don't have those excuses this time. I was plumb tuckered out after 24 days of fighting RL's River Rock, and I crashed hard for about a week after declaring the project done. Seriously. I had the energy of a slug, if that. Then my mother and I happened upon one of those once-in-a-lifetime sales that other people always seem to find but I've never come across until now: an Ethan Allen store was closing and doing a ridiculously discounted buy-and-carry sale to get rid of its inventory. And my goodness me, there were even things there that would work really well in my newly painted living room. Oooh. So I got some things, and have been having a lot of fun getting the place in order.

I've also been starting to paint both the ceiling and walls of our little entryway, which should be a simple, quick project (ha ha, you know what's coming, don't you)...Well, it's not. I was stupid and in a moment of weakness bought a gallon of cheap -- like, $9.99!! -- ceiling paint instead of going with something more expensive yet better quality. It looked great going on, but when it dried a bunch of cracks appeared and one little section even started peeling off! So now I'm stymied, because yes, I am just tight enough that wasting money on a poor quality gallon of paint is really irksome. So do I patch and try to put on another layer or 3 or 5 of the cheap paint, or do I suck up my loss and take the rest of the cheap paint to the paint-disposal place, go get the more expensive, better quality paint that I should have got in the first place, and then patch and paint...

Ahem.

Pictures!

A few Before and During shots, because I always do Before and During shots. Click the image if you'd like to see the larger size:

Shall I tell you the obvious, that this is a fireplace...




Buh-bye, beige.


These corners are different and neat and a real pain to paint around. Note the beige roller-hit-the-ceiling splotches the previous owners left for us. I knew there were a few beige splotches here and there throughout the house, but I'd never realized how many and how bad they were until I started de-beiging.


There's one other During shoot that shows the excessive streaking I was fighting throughout this project, but I took that with the point-and-shoot, which is mostly Pete's camera. I don't know 1) where the camera is, or 2) if he's already uploaded it, where he might have uploaded that image to. I'll post that one "tomorrow." Ha ha ha ha ha.

And now the After:

F is for Fireplace. Wow, does that green ever bring out the color of the stones! The beige sucked the color out before, but this...I love it!




This corner really needed a chair. Fortunately, a chair was one of my buy-and-carry finds.


So was the pillow.


Chair detail. I cannot tell you how much I love this little chair...


I've learned that photographing my living room is sort of difficult. It's a long, rectangular room with a ridiculous amount of corners, and the fireplace in the middle of the room, and big windows and sliding glass doors to the east and west, and a dining alcove which we've never used for dining right off from the living room, and the entryway comes right into the living room (very en vogue in 1951 when our house was built), and we've got two doorways-without-doors (what are those called?) leading off from the living room into a hallway and the kitchen...So, that little chair's in a southeast corner, stage right from the fireplace . In a southwest corner and stage left from the fireplace is this chair (sorry for the glare -- and I just realized from looking at this that I haven't got all of the hardware put back on the blinds! *laugh*):



which is part of a sofa and love seat grouping (I took this standing in the dining alcove). The little chair is stage left from the love seat, and the sofa is angled to face the fireplace...Are you totally confused now?



Without a wide angle lens, there's just no good way to take a picture of this grouping. But I tried, I really did. By this point the dog was quite concerned about my behavior. Please excuse the missing outlet covers; I'm painting them to match the walls.




Some of my other finds included that red lamp above (alas! its more-golden shade was broken, but they gave me an extra one, which will work quite well while I look for another), an area rug



and pillows. Lots and lots of pillows. These are details from a few that I especially love.










I also picked up some "wall decor," as Ethan Allen calls it:

The piano is now in the area formerly known as the dining alcove. At some point I will work up the nerve to pick up a hammer and start pounding nails into my freshly-painted walls and hang the wall decor, but for now I'm just fine with propping it on pianos and mantels and chairs.


I love how the color on the walls shifts with the light and where you're at in the room. Sometimes it seems really green, and at other times/angles it's a soft grey, and still other times it's somewhere in between...


And now even I'm bored with this. If you made it to the end of this enormous post, thanks for reading, and please feel free to come visit us and our "new" living room! Just watch out for bits of peeling ceiling paint on your way in.



*I almost always shoot in RAW, process, and then convert the images to JPG. Obviously, it's more time consuming that just shooting in JPG, but being able to adjust the shot settings post-shoot is very worth it.