How to Be Awesome at Home Decorating Part 1

As I have said before, we are moving soon.  Hopefully, if all goes well, we close on July the 8th, and we can start moving in on the 13th, which is a Wednesday.  The plan is for me to go start cleaning and painting that Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and then we should be able to move in that weekend. 

In order to do this, we will have to be ready to start painting on Wednesday, the 13th, which is coming soon, so yesterday we decided to start looking at paint samples.  We went to our friendly neighborhood Home Depot and pretty much got one of everything they had in the Behr paint section.  And they do have lots of cool stuff.  They have little booklets that tell you cool color palettes to use and big booklets that tell you I guess their most popular colors. 

Pictured:  Color gradient overload.

Brian and I spent some time yesterday just going through everything and figuring out which ones we're not at all interested in, and which ones were possibilities. 

I should back this up.  Before we even got to Home Depot, I had to call my sister Mallary because she knows all about art and decorating and what is a good idea (an accent wall) vs. a bad idea (a rainbow wall).  I know none of this.  My idea was to paint every wall beige and then just decorate from there because I thought making different rooms different colors was bad.  I mean, I wanted to do that, but I thought it wasn't "sophisticated."  Apparently that's not the case.  I also found out from her that some of my color choices were not......modern.  I believe, "That's so 1995" was how she described one idea I had.

Which is why I called her, because I wouldn't know 1995 colors if they came up and bit me in the face.

Oh, and also, I'm colorblind.  This is a problem.  I think I've mentioned this before.  I'm not colorblind to everything, but brownish colors are difficult for me to distinguish, and so are mixes of colors, like orange-yellow or red-orange.  That's why I try to go with bright primary colors, which, for an elementary classroom is fun.  Not so much for a house.  Trying to tell the difference between "Sand Fossil" and "Seaside Sand" is torture.  There shouldn't be that many gradients of off-white. 

When we got married, we had some vague ideas about colors.  We thought red and black would be cool in the kitchen, and we thought forest green and maroon would be cool in the bedroom (but that is apparently 1995 talking).  Oh, and our bathroom is like, a sandstone and sage combination, which I like and which we'll probably keep.

So we spent a long time looking at paint chips and booklets and trying to figure out what to do with our new little house.

One of the problems is that all these colors have the most distractingly hilarious/crazy names.  Our favorite was "pale shrimp."  But there are so many crazy ones like Yacht Harbor--what color do you think that is?  Or "Lunar Light," "Outback," and "Wilderness," which sounds like a brainstorming session for a fantasy novel, but not like paint colors..

We also don't have too many pictures of the house and we've only seen it twice, so we were trying to remember details about it using the pictures from the appraisal.  Everyone keeps saying, just wait until you can test samples, but the thing is, we only have three days to paint before the furniture comes in and things get a lot more complicated.  Awesome.

All I know is, first order of business is get rid of that gigantic floral wallpaper in the kitchen and bathroom.  Stat.

I am not a wallpaper person.  I don't even like to wear clothes with patters, let alone surround myself with them in my room.  Bleh.  (Sorry to all y'all who really like wallpaper.  I'm sure your house looks great with it.  Not mine.)  And this wallpaper is pretty bad.  The giant flower/vine thing looks like Tarzan and Tiny Gulliver decided to set up a country kitchen.

So right now we're thinking a more subtle version of our original bedroom idea,

black and red accents for the kitchen,

and yellows for the second guest room.

That's about as far as we've gotten so far, other than already knowing the master bathroom.  I am open to suggestions or to someone contacting Extreme Home Makeover for me at any time.