Living Room Progress

Travel, a lingering cold, a 24 hour stomach bug, and life has kept me from blogging about the living room progress!  In between those things I have been working on it though!  I finally finished mudding the ceiling - I got stuck there for a while because every time I inspected the ceiling I kept finding more things to fix.  More mud - more drying time - more sanding - more priming.  I finally just had to stop the perfectionism, because the ceiling really did look great!  It was to the point that I had the lights off in the room and was using a spotlight type lamp to identify the imperfections.

 

I put a total of two priming coats on the ceiling and then I painted on the first coat of ceiling paint, which I had tinted to the Benjamin Moore color 'classic gray.'  When I saw that color contrasted with the white primer color, I thought maybe I made a mistake at first.  It looked dramatic!  Then it dried and it looked just perfect!

 

I remember when I was a kid I wondered why people always painted their ceilings white.  I thought it looked so boring and always thought a little color would be fun.  The classic gray tint really makes the room feel so warm...I just can't wait to paint the trim and walls now!  Soon all of my ceilings will be that color.  I'm so grateful to my friend Wendy for sharing her paint colors with me!

Today my dad came over and helped me re-hang the trim.  I got to use a nail gun - pretty cool!  Tomorrow we are going to buy the extra trim pieces and then we will hang it all up tomorrow, caulk it all, and we will be done! ***Update - we hung the extra trim 2 1/2 inches below the crown molding original trim - we chose the distance based upon how it was done in the dining room and formal living room.  We used a huge power saw, made a spacing block to ensure we kept the proper distance, added all new molding to the hallway because it did not have any before...it was fun.  Here are some pictures of the progress...