The first thing anybody should do before they move in, is paint. In our case, the paint colors that the previous owners had painted just didn’t jive with our style. The paint was also pretty old so it needed to be freshened up in general in order for us to feel like we were dealing with clean surfaces.

I know that gray is having a moment right now, but it does happen to be my favorite color. I like having a neutral background so that my decorations can have the pops of color. I also wanted to have a consistent color scheme throughout the house. Something that would unify all the natural elements, like unfinished wood and brick. If the brick hadn’t already been painted it would have been cool to have left it in its natural state. But sandblasting isn’t really something we wanted to take on inside. Plus, we just didn’t have enough time to do that much work before we moved in.

One thing I will warn you about is that gray is really difficult to get right. I had to paint various shades of grey on the walls in each room to get the shades that would appear the way I wanted them to in our house with all the wood and natural light we have. This charcoal gray is actually a chocolate brown believe it or not. All the shades of grey we ended up painting upstairs had to be shades of taupe in order to look the right way against the wood. True gray actually appeared purple!

We did all the painting ourselves with the help of our family. We were able to make quick work of the entire upstairs. I will say after six years, the paint has held up great especially on the brick walls. The deep gray looks great in the living room with all of the light we get in there. But lately I’ve been gravitating towards a much lighter gray and have even been thinking of possibly repainting some of the walls white to make the rooms look bigger. We’ll see.

In my next post I’m going to start posting some of my pandemic projects from the past year so you can see everything we accomplished in the past year on the house.