Could you, would you have white walls? (Plus an accent wall sneak peek)

I’d continue that rhyme from my oh-so-super title but the only thing I can think of that rhymes with “walls” in the .74 seconds I am giving myself to spend on this beginning is “Could you, would you something something balls” and we just won’t go there. Except we probably already did. Apologies.

With the possible exception of the fact that I feel like I got hit by a truck (standing up and down repeatedly is overrated with an extra 10 pounds attached to you) I am feeling good about our recent house progress. Here’s where we stood on our common room makeover up until Saturday…

…and I say “until Saturday” because on Saturday, something in that room got a big hit of this.

Buuuut I’m not ready to share that particular project with you yet, so that’s all I’ll say for now. (Insert maniacally evil laughter here. Even though evil laughter makes no sense at this moment. Insert it anyway.)

The walls and ceiling have all been painted with Benjamin Moore’s Simply White in eggshell. In my humble clueless opinion that means nothing unless your name is Rick and therefore YOU MUST TRUST ME, Simply White is a really nice warm white—not too stark and icy, but no yellow undertones either. Even though white usually gets a bad rap (generally a renter’s woe), I chose white because a lot of the rooms I am drawn to have white or pale neutral walls with layers of bold color and pattern. Like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Basically, I knew that I wanted the walls to be the backup singers for furniture and accessories and accents that would be the real stars.

(Um, that back-up singer metaphor? Really, English teacher? That’s the best you could do? Gag. You should probably have a baby and quit your job.) 

The $4 dress from Old Navy that you see folded over the…scale…(???) in the above picture is the possible color palette inspiration for the room. And that dress, while I love the pattern, will not be worn by me in public. Ever. It will become pillows or something else more becoming than a sack on legs with a super unflattering hem and sleeves. Okay, okay; because you insisted, I’ll model it. Peer pressure these days.

You all wish YOUR dresses looked this cute. And that your hair looked this frizzled.

In addition to painting the walls, we also completed the super important step of forever leaving our mark on the floor that will soon-ish be carpeted. Obviously our mark would involve a cat face. Or a noseless, mouthless wannabe cat/rabbit (crabbit?) face with deformed ears. (I’ll give you a hint about which member of our household was the artist here: this person would look even worse in that dress than I did and their name rhymes with SHMICK.)

But despite that fact that I waste time taking pictures of my pasty white legs in non-flattering dresses and that Rick, I mean Shmick, paints pseudo-cat faces on the floor, we are moving right along with this room. Because just three weeks ago from the first picture in this post the same view looked like this:

Gives you a full shot of the floor that is now significantly improved with the addition of a crabbit.

Yes, progress is good.

Major things still to do:

• Herringbone the heck out of something in the room. Insert evil laughter again, with even less purpose this time around.
• Install new trim and crown.We bought MDF on Sunday—and Rick already started installing it. He is on this renovation like butter on bread. Like white on rice. Like bad similes on posts. Like my terrible figurative language is out of control and installing trim will make it stop.
• Carpet the floor. The whole upstairs is getting wall-to-wall for reasons I’ll discuss in another post but that stem from the lead poisoning I discussed in my last post.
• Paint that creamy yellow door. It’s like someone went to get their teeth whitened and the dentist missed a tooth. How embarrassing for them. And the dentist.
• Replace the ceiling fan…and move the new fixture, because it’s no longer centered since the closet was built.

Do you—or would you—have any white walls in your home? Any bad figurative language you’d like me to work into my next post? What do you think got a shot of navy and white herringbone? I’ll send a signed copy of the crabbit portrait to anyone who guesses correctly.