Builder's Beige to Cozy Sage

You know it's a Friday afternoon when I start randomly rhyming things because I think it makes them sound cooler. Very rarely does that actually happen. Although with this one, it might be a little accurate.

We have more than a few rooms we want to paint in the house. We talked about getting it all done before moving in, but ultimately decided that we should live in the house for a while and really figure out how we were using the spaces. Hopefully that's going to help us pick the right colors, furniture arrangements, and figure out what we might still be missing.

Well, we spent the first week in the house getting unpacked. To be honest, we're still not totally unpacked, but at least for now everything is in and ready to be unpacked. We've gotten a great start on the organizing and sorting through everything. In addition to what we donated before the move, I've made two more trips to the Goodwill donation center near my office.

We decided to take a break from all that fun stuff. (Maybe it's only fun for me. I don't see the big guy racing to get to the baskets for the linen closets first.) We painted our family room! It's really a lot of wall to cover and since it shares a wall with the kitchen, we wanted a nice neutral color that would blend well with whatever we chose to put on the kitchen walls as an accent.

Enter Olympic paint in Crocodile Tears. We went with Olympic paint because it has a low VOC count which makes it better for the environment, and makes it not smell like paint at all. With all the paint we needed, having almost no paint fumes was great!

It's a really soft yellowish-sage that goes great against our white trim, white mantle, and really pops the colors in the granite counter tops and the tile around the fireplace. And now that I've rambled on, here are the before and after shots. The pictures may not be the best, but they'll give you a good idea of what the room looks like now. I'd like to say that I need a higher quality camera, but I'm pretty sure my camera could use a higher quality photographer.

This is the family room before we moved anything in. Blank slate? Absolutely!

The picture below is one taken after our first week. It's kind of an in-between stage for the family room.

And here we are with the new paint color! The room still feels really open, but just a little warmer than it was before. It's got a little more personality now as well. I'd show you how it looks in the kitchen, but there's a hot mess on the counter top next to the sink. I'll have to take a better (i.e. cleaner) picture this weekend.

Loki approves.