Moon Shadows on the Walls and Sunflowers on the Floor

Exciting news from the downstairs bedroom at our little farm house - paint!  Yep, we now have four painted walls and the first coat of paint on the floor.  This is so exciting to me because it means we are closing in on a single finished room.  It's a small room and the room that needed the least amount of work, but still, it signifies the beginning of the fun part of house renovation.  

Not only does this small room have paint, it also has a brand new ceiling fan that is connected to electricity and everything.  With a light!  It even has a working light switch, and, we managed to install it and wire it up with a minimum amount of frustration.  We didn't even have to take it all back apart and figure out what we assembled wrong because it worked on our first try.  I'm telling you, we are getting better at this stuff! 

Unlike the fan installation, we did not get the wall paint color right the first time.  We decided to use a dark color in an attempt to hide some of the imperfections in the drywall, and we have a blue room at our other house that we really like.  We selected a color swatch that we thought looked the same, compared it to the floor color swatch we selected, and had the paint mixer man make a gallon for us.  Well, as soon as we painted a few strokes on the wall we knew we didn't like it.  It was too... blue, and when adjacent to the white trim it looked like the color a twelve year old boy who was a fan of the University of Kentucky wildcats would select.   

We took the gallon of paint back to Lowe's and asked the paint mixer man if we could change the color.  You would think that a person who spends their days mixing paint colors would have some idea of which direction you can take blue paint in order to make it less blue.  Not so.  He laughed and told me he couldn't pick my colors for me when I wanted to know if it was better to select a grayer color, or something on the green or red side of spectrum.  He couldn't give us any clues and instead I just had to bring him swatches and let him check with the computer to see if it would work.  And it's not like Brandon and I don't have some experience mixing paint colors considering Brandon has even made a career of it, but the Lowe's paint man lives by strange computer generated color mixing rules, and will not just put a squirt of red it to see what happens as I suggested.  Eventually we landed on the color called Moonshadow, which he was able to tint our blue gallon to make.  

On Sunday, while Brandon started on the floor paint, my nieces came for their first visit to the farm.  We raced, explored, and picked and ate pears.  

The air was crisp and sky was clear blue.  The heat from the sun felt wonderful in the cool air.  I spread afghans on the outdoor seating and the when girls were snuggled in blankets on the lounge chair cushion, resting with their eyes closed and faces to the sun, the elder niece said in a tone of discovery, "Look, it's peace and quiet."  It was.  I could see it too.    

There is still work to be done in this room, including painting the trim that I so laboriously scraped of flaking paint.  The floor paint color I chose is called Sunflower.  With the blue walls, white trim, and orange floor I hope it doesn't feel like we are sleeping on a basketball court!