Since we’ve moved our focus inside while we sweat through the summer, I’ve actually been decently productive. I spent the last couple of weeks painting the stairwell, upstairs hallway, and finishing up an accent wall downstairs.

When we moved in a couple of years ago, one of the first things we did was paint the entire downstairs but lost motivation and decided we hated the paint color we chose before getting around to painting the stairwell or any of the upstairs rooms. Since then, we’ve painted the future master closet, craft room, Kyle’s office, and the guest bathroom. We also slapped up a coat of white paint in our room just to get rid of the yellow/beige but the stairwell and upstairs hallway remained untouched.

Not anymore! With the exception of our bathroom, the yellow color I hate so much is out of our house and we’re both over the freakin’ moon about it. Picking a new color was a major chore and I must have gone through 10 different grays before settling on Benjamin Moore Gray Owl (color matched to Clark + Kensington paint at Ace because they were BOGO).

The thing I like most about this paint is that it’s not purple! Yay! I mentioned forever ago that I hate the gray we chose downstairs because it reads as a very light purple color. If I want purple, I’m going all the way (Ohhhhh, foreshadowing!). Eventually, the downstairs will be painted Gray Owl as well. It can look a couple of different colors depending on the light but I don’t mind that as much as light purple 24/7. It’s mostly just a really neutral gray but I can’t say it’s the “perfect” gray because paint isn’t going to look the same in every house. If you’re looking for a light gray, I recommend trying out Gray Owl but keep in mind that you’ll probably want to try several samples to see what looks best in your own home.

MORE PICTURES! Keep in mind that I didn’t edge since we’re planning on putting up crown and switching the current baseboards for something a little more substantial.

During:

After:

This one is pretty dark but it’s a shot of the corner where the stairwell meets the hallway downstairs. The left is the new paint and the right is what’s currently painted downstairs. You can tell a major difference here between the two colors and how purple the original gray looks.

While I was on my paint happy spree, I also painted an accent wall downstairs. I’m not usually an accent wall person (minus the hot pink wall in my college apartment) but this wall is kind of weird in that it’s not really part of a room. I mean, it kind of is but…not really? You’ll see what I mean in a sec, but it’s kinda/sorta part of the study (fancy word for the extra room that serves no purpose right now) but it’s mostly on it’s own forming a pseudo-hallway from the foyer. This is what it looks like with new paint and new crown (new baseboards will be put in eventually whenever we can afford to redo all of the floors downstairs).

BAM. Purple in your face! I’ll give you all a moment to get over the shock that we have a wall in our house that isn’t gray or navy. I don’t know why I decided I wanted purple down here but I love it. I couldn’t commit to a full purple room but I think this wall is the perfect place to play with a little color. This view makes me really want to tackle the living room but we’re not quite ready for that yet (although I did test a little paint on the fireplace yesterday – currently hidden by my cat chalkboard).

Of course I can’t have a post that doesn’t have some sort of screw up in it so I’ll show you what I did with my leftover purple paint.

Yeeeeeaaaaah, about that. We have a different door that we’ll eventually put here (we’ve only been saying that for oh about the last year and a half since we bought said door) but I wanted to test out the purple to see if that’s the way we want to go. Turns out, it’s not. I think if we did a purple on the front door we’d need to go with something a little deeper that’s more eggplant and less Barney. I’m sure our neighbors love this. Luckily, the reflection off of our storm door hides this hack job pretty well for now.