With school starting this coming Monday (ugh!) and almost 27 and 1/2 hours of driving over the next 3 days to pick up our son from his cooking internship in Rhode Island and bring him home, my husband and I worked as hard as we physically could to at least get the sunroom in some kind of order before coming home from the trip.

He worked on priming the room and dressing up the old built in bookcases with trim and moldings, installing electric for book lights, as well as building me stunning faux mantel and adding crown moulding around the room. We knew we couldn’t get the flooring done in time for our son’s late summer three week visit before the fall semester, but we at least wanted the main construction finished and freshly painted before he got home and we had to go back to work.

A fresh coat of paint (including primer) turned out to be 7 total coats!

Everything was going fine as of last week. My husband had primed the room three times ( the walls are part of the former red brick exterior porch that had been converted to a sunroom sometime in the late 60’s) and then he started painting the room a custom off white we blended from various white paints. In this photo you can see how the old recessed bookshelves looked before we added more woodwork to make them look more like elegant bookcases. 

(Trying out almost all my pillows to see if I liked ANYTHING with the white walls, which I didn’t!)

I wasn’t liking the brighter white at all behind our leather chesterfield sofa, which we hadn’t originally planned to use in the sunroom at all. It had been sitting in the sunroom since we sold the yellow birck home in last December just taking up sapce. We were going to purchase new slipcovered off white loveseats, but on a whim decided to see if the sofa would fit before putting such a nice and expensive piece of furniture in storage (we literally had no other spot for it in the house but wanted to keep it in case our son would need it for his first apartment.) Before moving to storage we just decided to play around with placement, and to our suprise it fit  just fine! We loved that we could used it after all, but it sort of threw me for a loop with the direction I was going with the vibe room.

Farmhouse Living Blooming Ivy Lane

Then I got a whim to paint the room a moody green after seeing all of the gorgeous  moody green, and blue rooms featuring built ins and fireplace walls on Pinterest and Instagram. I thought with the leather chesterfield, maybe we should go with more of a masculine, cozy or English garden green inspired sunroom and it would be so amazing!

So while my husband worked on building the faux fireplace and bookcases, I painted the whole room a deep green and even though I KNEW I hated it right away, for some reason I kept painting it, including all ELEVEN tedious windows until my finger joints were literally swelling.  I also tried several colors behind the sofa to try to convince myself the room needed to be green, but I didn’t like any of the colors.

It was painting the brick around the faux fireplace that really turned my stomach to look at. We both realized that we associated the green brick with our college and also two schools I have taught at where green was the main color and the brick walls were green. It wasn’t relaxing at all to associate the room with school and work, even if green is my favorite color! Plus, no matter what shade of green I tried, all of  my green accent pillows or faux greenery just seemed to clash.

As you can see, I brought home nearly every possible green sample from Sherwin Williams and then wasted a bunch of money on 3 or 4 more  of Benjamin Moore and Magnolia green shades and nothing looked right. The colors wood read green, gray, mint or black on various walls of the room. I kept looking at the white brick walls above and I knew I had to paint it back!

So, we worked until midnight most evenings. In order to get the job finished we couldn’t stop working just to take daylight pictures for blogging, so I snapped what I could at night. I recently had a bit of an autoimmune relapse with bloodwork showing active Lupus, so I had no business pushing myself any harder than I already had. I ended up hiring my nephew and his friend to come and help us knock out the painting as fast as possible.

Bless their teenage hearts, they did a pretty good job but there were still a lot of areas I had to clean up. I completely forgot to tell them not to get paint on the original 1920’s back door hinges that were in excellent shape!  Even after they painted for about 6 hours, we still had to hit most areas with another coat of paint the next day and the windows took about 3 additional coats to cover all the green.

In the end, it was back to the very first color I ever tried in the room!

The irony of this whole story is that I did a swatch section of Sherwin Williams Dover White last summer and liked it, but thought it might read too yellowish on a couple of the walls with the way the sunlight hit. That’s why we custom mixed a lighter white.

Paint Color Project

Well, after deciding to use the dark brown leather sofa, I knew the room needed to be a warmer, creamy white and after all that stress, wasted money and time, the room ended up Dover White!

Here is the gorgeous bookcase upgrade in progress! The bottom section is all faux. There was about 18 inches of brick below each of the recessed bookshelves, but I wanted it to look like cabinets underneath. My husband added faux doors and drawers, and beadboard to the back of the cabinets. He created shelves for each cabinet and I decided to warm them up by painting them to look like wood instead of white. (Pine doesn’t stain well.)

I used a the popular faux Pottery Barn paint finish technique on the shelves and my vintage pedestal table that needed some major tlc. The table and shelves turned out great! **More about the table makeover with the paint technique in future post.

And here is a sneak peak of how this whole gorgeous faux fireplace and built-ins wall is turning out. It is stunning! It may just be some of his best work. And that dreamy-creamy Sherwin Williams Dover White is MY style. This is why I just can’t follow major paint trends!

Sneak Peek!

At certain times of the day the walls do look buttery yellow, but it’s really pretty, especially in the morning sunlight. There are still some touch ups to cover some green areas we missed around the windows, and I can’t wait to add the billowy sheer linen drapes to soften the space and create that light and airy sunroom feel, which the room NEEDS to have in order for me to feel at home there. We haven’t committed to a type of flooring but after all of this there is no way I am rushing that decision!

Do I still love the moody wall colors and would I every consider using them in my home? Yes, if I already had textiles and artwork and things to pull a room together. But not on any room with with 11 windows!!!!

The moral of the story is to always follow your own heart in decorating and create spaces you and your family will want to live in! We are taking the next three weeks off from working on the house to spend the precious time with our son who we haven’t seen since May before he heads back to Culinary school in New York in September. I will certainly be tweaking some things and messing around with decorating ideas in the room and I do have some additional bookcase and door makeover to share this week, so check back for more updates.

So, tell me if you have ever had any kind of major painting or decorating fiascos, and if so what did you do about it? I love hearing from you! 

Thanks for visiting!

Amber