Painting your house and make it a Home for Pennies

Ok, so you want to remodel/redecorate your house, or you just bought a new home and you're tired of the white walls that stare back at you each night, but you don't really have the money to hire an interior designer to make your home to look like one of the rich and famous. So what can you do? Well, you can go to your nearest home improvement stores like Home Depot or Lowe's and get yourself a few cans of paint and get those design juices flowing and before you know it, you can transform your living from white walls to a warm welcome home:








Jon and I learned a few tips along the way on how to paint like the pros. Well, we did have some problems with bleeding edges in the living room, which was the first one we did (see pics above), but with the family room and our master bedroom, there was much improvement. Jon discovered this little tool, what we call the "edger," and instead of painting with a brush, he applied paint directly onto the edger (thickly) and that used the edger to apply paint on all the walls. This seemed to work better and was less messy than using a brush and also saved a lot of paint from getting trapped in the brush and thus wasted.

Picking paint colors will probably take another post to discuss (the choices were overwhelming!), but we decided that our goal was to achieve a relaxed and warm home so we picked natural/ neutral tones for our rooms and are pleased with the results. We bought all our paint at Home Depot for their Behr brand (Lowe's American Tradition was a close second, but HD was a few dollar cheaper for equally good paint). For our living room, we used Behr's Satin paint in this color called "Promenade." For our family room, we used Behr's Satin again in "Pecan Sandie." For the master bedroom, we used Behr's Satin yet again (basically, we did not want flat paint for any room because it feels rough to the touch) and chose "Gypsy magic."

Overall, we were successful with this home improvement project and highly suggest any of you wanting to spruce up your home or add some color and personality to your place to try painting your house because it is one of the easiest and least expensive way to make your house a home.

joy