We moved into the house in October 2014. Eight months later we had done nothing to start the process. My house was dark, there were shadows where there shouldn’t be shadows…there was all kinds of wrong with the house. But there was also all kinds of right. One Saturday morning I woke up and said, “It’s time to pull the band aid off.” I figured if I didn’t do it then, 20 years from now I will be sitting in my house thinking that I should have done the work when I was younger. One thing is, there is never a good time to do work on your house. NEVER! There is always a birthday party or swim lesson or dance class.  There is always a meeting or a customer that wants something. But, the house needs the attention. Weighing our options, we decided that we would start with the dining room. It’s the least used room in the house. The easiest room to work around and least invasive. I packed the kids in the car and went to Home Depot to look at paint samples. I read reviews in HGTV regarding paint and what kind to use.  Please note if I had my druthers I would have used Benjamin Moore because that’s what my dad always used. However, we are on a budget and need to be smart about it. Behr makes a good paint, good coverage and it’s less expensive. They have a color matching (which I think all or most companies do now) so if you find a color you like, they can match it. I wanted something simple: gray walls, white trim.  I came home with four shades of gray and placed samples on the wall. And I didn’t like any of them. How can I not like one of them? One was too light, one had too much blue in it, one was too dark and the last one, looked entirely different on the color sheet then it did in reality. After letting them dry and checking the samples in different light throughout the day, back to Home Depot I went.  I would suggest you do the color sampling when you have time and can check it different times of the day. After three trips, I found the color I liked, Natural Gray by Behr. That was the hard part or so I thought. Our dining room had chair rail that we were removing along with crown mold and baseboards and shoe mold. Crown mold was easy, came down without a problem. And then we went to remove the chair rail and the paper of the sheet rock started coming off with it. Yikes! YouTube videos come in handy when you are trying to do something for the first time and you have no idea what you are doing. So, what we thought was a weekend project, maybe two weekends, turned into so much more…

First we had to figure out what was wrong. After googling it and finding a video,  my husband was able to figure out what he needed. Lots and lots of sandpaper and putty. So, off to Home Depot he went. We got a hand sander, putty, a putty knife, you name it, we got it. The only thing we did not get was the additional time in our schedules needed to do the work. There were many late nights sanding and waiting for the next layer of putty to dry. We essentially had to rebuild the walls in places where the paper had ripped.  The previous owners had painted multiple coats of paint around the chair rail that literally the chair rail was painted (almost glued) onto the wall.  Once we figured it out, it went much quicker and pretty soon I had smooth repaired walls ready for the gray paint that only took three trips to the store to pick out. So excited to finally get some of the 80s out of my house, if only in the dining room.   Lessons learned: work with your paint salesman, they will and can help you; be ready for the unexpected because it’s going to happen; be patient because it’s going to take longer than you think it should; and always tell you husband what a great job he is doing because an overly critical eye after he has spent a night sanding is not going to go over well! Happy Painting!