Colour My House ...Buffy and Wedding Silk With a Hint of Drum Beat.

Le Petit Trianon with Tibetan Orange walls.

I love painting but priming all the drywall (ceiling and walls) and sanding and priming the trim was tedious.  When all this preparation was done, I was eager to put on the final colour. 

I chose to use the CIL paints sold at Home Depot since the colour palettes made it easy to coordinate the colours.  I chose the soft and elegant palette (identified by the feather symbol) with colour names like Buffy, White Whisper and Eloquent Ivory for the upstairs and the deep and luxurious palette (identified by the moon and stars) namely, Wedding Silk, Highland Plains and Drum Beat as accent for the downstairs. I deviated from the colour scheme only for the main floor bedroom for which I chose to use a Behr paint and primer in one in a colour called Tibetan Orange. I've always loved bold colours but decided in this house to go for more neutral tones.  When it came time to choose a paint for the main bedroom, I couldn't resist choosing this bold, rich colour.  At first I was going to use it only on one wall but I loved the colour so much I decided to paint all the walls.  This paint was amazing, it covered in only 2 coats which for a rich vibrant colour is almost unheard of.

My other favourite colour was called Belcourt Castle - a soft greeny, beige which I used in the upstairs bedrooms.  I'm not sure whose job it is to come up with the names for these colours but I'm sure that market research has shown that consumers are drawn to the name as well as the colour. 
For me, choosing the wall colour is the exciting part of decorating.    I can't wait to see it on the wall; although often at first I don't know if I really like the colour, I usually end up loving it.   For some reason, I find painting relaxing; I put on a talking book (books on cd) and mindlessly start painting, only stopping to change the cd from time to time.  
Once the walls were done, we moved on to painting the trim i.e. baseboards, doorframes, crown molding, railing and fireplace.  The preparation here took some time since most of the trim was new, it had to be sanded, primed, filled, sanded and then painted with 2 coats of paint.  We used the same colour for all the trim downstairs (Wedding Silk) and we used an oil based paint. 
The kitchen cupboards got the same treatment.  I never thought we would finish painting the trim - it took a good month or more to finish with just my husband and I doing all the painting.
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