brown friday

a lot of people go shopping on “black friday,” the day after thanksgiving. mathew and i never follow that tradition. this year we decided to paint.

the downstairs living room was a very pale pink because my grandmother loves pink but mathew never really warmed up to the color.

since my grandmother moved out, we decided the room needed a drastic change. i liked a painted wall in a west elm catalog, mathew liked it too, so that morning we walked to the paint store.

we came home and got to work. we put down drop cloths and masked off the baseboards to protect from stray drops, but otherwise decided to paint around the trim free-hand, without tape. the first of the new color goes on…

it’s brown! but i think it looks much better in person than in these photos. in the can it looked like chocolate pudding. dried on the wall, it’s a difficult color to describe, a kind of grey-ish, purple-ish, brown. it’s from the same color palette as the grey in the office, just one shade darker. the shade in the office is called “elephant grey” this one’s called “smoked oyster.”

(above right) while we were painting mathew decided he wanted a color in the built-in shelf, similar to what we’ve done in the closet and other rooms. we have a lot of different left-over colors so i said, “let me think about what would work best there.” but within the next hour i heard mathew rolling paint onto that wall as he said, “oops!” he just couldn’t resist painting it but i think it works.

ta-da!

later that weekend we bought a media cabinet (soon to hold a tv), a rug and a floor lamp (not pictured above.) we’re getting the downstairs unit ready for use as a short-term vacation rental. there’s a lot we still need for this room, but it’s a start.