a wide place

Amie spent the better part of 2023 trying to convince me to paint our living room a rich peacock green. I loved the idea; I’d seen dark green in friends’ homes, but I was terrified to try something so bold in our own. Especially the living room! We don’t have an entryway, so it’s the first thing everyone sees when they walk in the door.

Plus our living room is north-facing and with a front porch is actually the darkest room in our house. Would a dark paint color make it feel claustrophobic?

However, after our friend, Annie, came and designed our gallery wall, I kept thinking, This would really look better against a dark paint rather than gray.

Then, as we relaxed around the fire pit on Christmas night, David asked me, “What’s the next thing you want to do to our house?” and without thinking I responded, “Paint the living room dark green!” He was surprised for sure. But said immediately, “Okay. Want me to do it this week while I’m off work?”

What!?

He called my bluff. I was thinking more like summer, to give me some extra time to decide if that’s what we want.

But I knew I needed to seize the moment and said, “Let’s go for it!” It’s just paint, right? Just a hundred bucks, give or take, a couple days of house chaos, and several hours of labor.

We had another rainy day ahead of us, so David wanted to start right away.

This happened the day after Christmas, mind you, so it necessitated us jumping up on the morning of the 26th and taking down all our decorations. Christmas was over fast for us this year!

After a frantic text to Annie, who had picked the paint color for her own house and told me, No, I don’t need to try a sample first, I drove to Lowe’s for the paint: Peacock House, by Valspar.

David and Amie moved furniture, took down the tree, boxed decorations, and began patching walls.

I was only gone an hour!

I was tasked with finishing packing up the decorations and walking the dog.

Call me dramatic, but I almost changed my mind at the Lowe’s paint counter, when I saw how dark the green was. The employee mixing my paint encouraged me, “Just go for it! It’ll be fun!”

My favorite thing to do while members of my family are painting a room is to give it a good deep clean. It feels like a fresh start. This is what our baseboards looked like. Yikes.

It was another internal battle to decide on eggshell finish. I really prefer the look of flat paint, but the last coat of paint in our living room was flat and it just did not hold up well to a family of six plus four indoor pets (well three mostly in cages, but still). So eggshell it is.

True love is using an artist’s brush to paint under the edges of the whole bookshelf.

With the first coat mostly finished, we took a house break for a couple hours. I cuddled with my dog and drank a cup of tea with the Christmas gift Judah and Amie gave me: Heirloom Rooms, by Erin Napier (I love it!), and wondered what exactly we were doing to our own heirloom room. With all the gloom and rain outside, certain walls looked near-black.

But we forged ahead, my friends, and both coats were complete by bedtime. David moved furniture back in, and the next morning Annie came over again (just over a week from her last visit) to help re-hang everything on the walls and make it feel like a home again.

Here’s our Before and After.

Before:

After:

What do you think?

It took me about 24 hours to really start loving the color. It was just so different. But now I’m absolutely thrilled. I feel like the rich, dark walls somehow make our things look nicer: the sofa and TV table, the shelves of book and wall art.

It feels like living in a library. What could be better?

I’m grateful to David and Amie — the project was a lot of work and truly a labor of love. I’m grateful to Annie, who came back to re-create that stunning gallery wall.

As we enter the new year, it feels so fun to have a fresh, clean living room.

Finally, just so you know we’re real people, here’s what it looks like right now as I’m typing this post.

Happy New Year!