We finished painting the living room over the weekend, and by "we" I mostly mean "my mom." I helped by doing dummy tasks, like taping everything that could possibly get any paint on it, and using a brush to paint around the taped edges. She did the important things, such as using the roller to paint large swathes of blank wall. Mom also did the touch-ups, since I couldn’t even see what needed to be touched up.

Then we (again, mostly my mom) moved the furniture back where it belonged and had coffee and cake.

After taping the heck out of the dining room and one wall of the kitchen, I started to paint around the edges of the kitchen. Surprise! The paint was bright blue. I’m not saying it would make your eyes bleed just from looking at it, but it was pretty darn bright blue. So we’re (… okay… my mom…) going to go back to the store and get a darker blue and paint over the bright blue, using it as sort of a primer.

Our color odyssey is not going well. So far we’ve tried three colors of paint and my mom hasn’t really liked any of them. The initial living room color was too dark. The second one (which we just decided to use anyway) is too rosy for my mom’s taste, although I think it looks great. And the third one is bright blue, when we were hoping for a more cobalty, deep midnight color.

Hopefully the nice mellow almond we (… okay, well, you probably know better by now) chose for the other dining room walls will work out. Otherwise I may try to bully my mom into choosing colors randomly with a dart board from now on.