Master Bathroom

I have finally figured out what I want to do with the master bathroom. It isn't that we really dislike the way it was when we bought the house, it is fine. It is more just a case that the decorative tile in the shower and other details in the bathroom just go unnoticed. The decorative tile in the shower goes unnoticed until you get into the shower which seems like a shame to me, why spend money on decorative tile if you are just going to let it go unnoticed. Knowing that I wanted to make the decorative tiles and other small touches in the bathroom stand out more is where my idea stemmed from. I decided that in order help pull out the blue in the decorative tiles and add to the French theme that the towel bars and toilet roll holder and a lot of the other smaller things in the bathroom seem to have I would go with a nice traditional blue toile for a curtain. This would also help make the room appear more finished as having a bare window in there right now just makes the room feel unfinished to me.

This isn't necessarily the exact toile I will use to make the curtain for the bathroom window, but it provides an idea of what the curtain will look like. Now that the curtain was decided I was left figuring out what else to do with the room to make it feel more finished and make it work better for us. I knew we also needed to find a new paint color for the bathroom because to us the bathroom is just not that inviting. It is a muddy shade, not a bad color really but just not something we feel is appropriate for a large bathroom like ours. I know we both loved the bathroom of our last place at grad school and that was a rather bright bathroom with a retro feel to it. It was two different shades of green with bright white as the third color. I don't think that color scheme would work in this bathroom of course, but I know we both like a nice cheerful bathroom. I think that when I have a brighter color on the walls of my bathroom it helps me to wake up and start my day off on a more positive step. I think that a nice light and fairly bright shade of yellow would be a good match for the blue in the toile and the decorative tile work. I still have to pick the exact color for the walls, but a friend suggested The Freshaire Choice for a non-VOC paint. I did notice that they have at least one yellow that might work for our bathroom (it's kind of hard to tel when looking at paint chips on the computer) - Delightful Daffodil. I still need to get paint chips for The Freshaire Choice line of paints and see if I can find some other good non-VOC paints that are available locally. A non-VOC paint is very important to us for the interior of our house because we really don't want to breath in all that stuff while we are painting or to need to air the house out for several weeks after painting. Non-VOC paints are just a much healthier paint option.

The house is painted

We are so happy with the results of having our house painted. The painters did an excellent job. We already had one neighbor request a business card from our painter and another one asked me what we paid for all the work. I know several other houses in the area could use a fresh coat of paint like our house just got. For us it was as much about maintenance as it was about aesthetics. Some of the wood trim on our house had no paint left on it and was beginning to warp due to exposure to all the elements. Hopefully we caught it early enough not to have any bigger problems where the wood had been so exposed.

The paint colors have been picked

After painting patches of Dunn Edwards High Noon and Inside Passage on various spots of our house yesterday to help us decide between the two colors. We then turned to all of our friends via this blog, Twitter and Facebook to help us make sure that we were right in the color we were pretty sure we wanted. As all of our friends were leaning towards the same color as we were we have decided on Inside Passage for the main house color and Swiss Coffee for the trim on the house. The darker of the two color swatches above is the house color and the lighter one is the trim color, oddly enough the colors we picked are almost identical to those of our dining room (which is still painted as the previous owners had it). We called our painter this morning with our final color selections and he will be out on Monday to start the work.

test patches of paint

Today we ran to Dunn-Edwards and picked up samples of the two colors we had narrowed it down to and sought advice as to which kinds of paint and primers were appropriate to use on the house so that the paint doesn't fade and chip too quickly. Much of the paint on the trim work was chipped off pretty bad when we bought the house and some areas had no paint left on them so we want to be certain to get a good paint job that would last more than a year or two.

The guys at Dunn-Edwards were very helpful and recommended Ultra-Grip primer for the trim, doors, etc and Eff-Stop primer for the stucco on the house. They also recommended Perma-Sheen paint for the trim, doors, etc and Evershield for the stucco on the house.

Time to paint the house

Well, when we bought our new house we knew painting it was one of the first things we would have to tackle, so here we are tackling the job of picking a color to paint the exterior of the house. After much thought we decided that we wanted to "match" the color of the stone wall on the front of our house and that we would stick with a bright white for the trim. We decided on the trim color partly due to the windows in the addition having no trim around the white windows and therefore thought that the white would help make the trim around the house blend better.

We went through a stack of paint chips several times in order to narrow our color choices for the main exterior. We are now down to two colors. Dunn Edwards Inside Passage and High Noon. Inside Passage is the lighter color of our stone wall and High Noon is the darker color of our stone wall.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions, etc are welcome as to our color choice for the house. We are hoping to keep the cottage look and feel of the house. We are leaning towards an English cottage style for the front yard landscape, various flowers and plants that can just kind of have the unintentional feel about them - as if they just kind of grew there. Of course I will post some of the ideas for our front yard in the future, but we really do need to get the house painted soon as parts of our trim have no paint left on them.

Inside Passage












High Noon