You know Bear, right? Oh, how we love Bear here. If he lived next door, he would be my best friend. What a cool guy…he cooks, cleans, if always cheerful, not ashamed to dance like a goofball, and has a nice singing voice. Can’t beat that.
Now that it’s winter and all I do, basically, is sit and look at the walls, I’ve decided I need to paint. I figure I have two options:
A. Basic white.
Benefits: Nice and bright. Everything matches it. I can do it quite cheaply, as the recycling center has scads of white paint that they give away. I can go for a nice shabby chic look.
(Insert term for “Opposite of Benefits” here): Booooring. I have the entire HOUSE to think of here. Do I really want to paint every single wall the SAME color? Barring that, can I even manage one room of white, which, when you finish putting it on, you don’t stand back and say, “Wow! What a great color!”; you just stand back and say, “Okay. Now it’s all white. Now what?” and start picking out furniture that you can’t afford.
B. Bear in the Big Blue House-type colors:
Benefits: Whooo! FunfunFUN! The colors! The trim! Everything! It would be a blast to paint my house like that. The kids would love it (the little ones, at least.) The people of Friends have bright paint, and their apartments are great. If I get tired of it, or when the kids get older, I can always go back to…you got it, White.
OOB: Might be more expensive, although some of the paints would be available at recycling. It’s wacky. My mother would not approve.
Hmmm. Not so many bad points as I would have expected…
Furniture-wise, all I have is the couch, which I’ll be trying to replace this summer anyway, so I don’t have to worry about matching things. And the floor has to be repainted too…probably just a terra cotta color, designed to look like tiles.
Whatcha think? Sound fun? Or should I wait until my hormone levels return to normal?
My floor in the hallway is slate–earthy shades of blue, red, and gray (mostly gray). Living room…well, you don’t wanna know (suffice to say I was pregnant, hormonal, and had a weird attraction to sort of a parrot-colored TEAL. And cream, and white. in a sort of checkerboard pattern.) Anyway, I’m gonna paint the living room floor again…maybe black, maybe terra cotta or some other kind of neutral color.
I do have nearly a full gallon of parrot-colored teal that I can use, too. It’s a nice color, actually…just not great on the floor of a mossy green room.
Go for it. Make it as wild as your imagination will allow. It’s only paint, after all, and if you don’t like it, you can paint over it. We have peacock blue, deep terra cotta, yellow and green in our house, and going to friends’ homes is like stepping into a cotton ball.
And here I was thinking you were going to paint your house exterior like Bear’s. Now THAT would be something!
As for your walls–go for it! My entire house is done in color, and I love it that way. Bright blue and white for the kitchen, deep green and magenta in the bathroom, a lovely kelly green in my bedroom… My absolute favorite though is my son’s room. The walls are a nice deep red, but then we painted big patches all over it, each one decorated with a different pattern or design. It looks like a giant quilt. Maybe it’s a bit tacky, but the little guy doesn’t seem to mind, and I’m going to be sad when he “grows out of it” (it was a lot of work!).
And oh, belladonna, would I LOVE to paint the outside like that! Unfortunately, we are all wood- and brick-covered on the outside, so I suppose I’ll have to maintain an outward semblance of normalcy. Damn.
And in one more way I feel closer you to bodypoet!
When I feel in the mood to paint the walls I go to Lowes and check out the pre-mixed paint that people mixed and then didn’t want.
Way cheap that way.
And for some reason Stuffy doesn’t want me to talk to his wife about painting and bathroom designs.
I think she did something in yellow and flowers once while he was at work and I proceeded to tell him about what my hubby came home to.
It’s called dusty plum.
And we have a wonderful clawfoot bath tub and so I painted it as well and the claws are black around green balls. Right now the floor vent matches the old paint but that is soon to change.
I think what really threw poor Stuffy and hubby for a loop was the verigated simmering glow in the dark butterflies all over the place.
The ceiling kind of slopes in there and I have to get the glow in the dark stars up there soon. It should be very nice for a midnight bath with the candles and the glow of starlight in there.
Speaking of candles have you found any green tea to play with yet for scents?
Yes. Absolutely. AND ~
when we were kids my Dad painted two large trees on the kids’ bedroom wall. Then each kid painted some creatures to live in the tree ~ sure, we had our birds and such, but also a frog, bunny, dog., Sesame Street characters.
Later my brother and I used acrylics to cover an interior door with a wild “un-pattern” of all the colors of the rainbow.
I absolutely adore Bear. I could come to love him almost as much as I love Kermit. I was always far more into the show than my son was. Sometimes I tear up when Bear and Luna sing the goodbye song.
I had a friend who was really into Mexican art and she painted the interior walls of her house really bold shocking colors. I found that hue was really important. Some rooms were really great looking, but others were just too much. Waaaay too much. But I’m sure you’ll be a good judge. Go for it.
That would be “tints” Babs. “Shades” are when you add black. Duh. Other than that, it’s a swell idea. You go first.
Bear would be the host and star of Bear in the Big Blue House Omniscient. It’s a kids’ show on the Disney Channel. Very good for the under five crowd. (And their parents!) Again, duh.
-Rue. (a little snippy today…)
Only one room in my house has white paint on the walls, and that’s the kitchen (and one wall of that is pale blue). Most of the rooms of the house have pale, low-intensity tints, thus:
living room: 2 pale beige walls, 2 very pale white-grape green walls
dining room: 2 pale lavender walls, 2 pale aqua-green walls
bathroom: light blue
main bedroom: pinkish beige, like a lighter version of terracotta.
The spare bedroom is where I indulged the rich colour side of my taste. Two walls are a rich aubergine purple, the other two are aquamarine blue, the ceiling is pale heather and the woodwork is jade. The carpet is cherry pink (carpet came with the house), and the soft furnishings are in shades of purple. The wardrobe doors are painted in a dull mid-purple, with a rectangular design painted on in pale heather and edged in gold.
A few years back, I lived in a shared house that had been decorated in various bright colours of paint, mainly golden yellow and rich purple, which were bargains from the reduced to clear shelf of the hardware store. It looked great.
I painted my daughters room 4 different colors The walls are (one color each) blue, pink, purple, and green with white trim. It would have been daisy yellow trim but I couldn’t get it done before we moved in and due to health concerns I don’t want to paint this winter with the house closed up and her spending so much time inside.
The colors are not pastels but not primary (I think of easter when I see them). I found the hardest part to be deciding which colors should go next to each other - I wanted to avoid the blue and pink being on the largest and most obvious walls so the room wouldn’t feel like a nursery (she’s 5). If I had realized earlier that I wasn’t going to have time to paint the trim, I would have made the blue wall yellow instead, it is such a gorgeous shade.
Paint away and do find the mistint section of your local hardware store… I get a lot of paint there…
I have a purple living room and a gold/green bedroom and a yellow/blue kitchen with plaid accents in matching yellow and blue…
My daughter’s room is sky blue with a chalkboard castle with trees and flowers and birds and butterflies.
Now my monopoly room… that’s white but it isnt like you see a lot of the walls… I’m currently trying to decide if I want to decoupage a border of monopoly money around the top of the walls… Or should I paint a board around the five foot uncle pennybags I got for christmas??
It’s a normal living room type living room, with a fireplace, a painted floor (also to be painted), and here’s the kicker: a BIG, 11x7’ picture window. It’s a great window that lets in lots of indirect light–but it’s light that filters through the trees outside, so it always has a nice cool, green feel.
What color to choose? I don’t want to lose the quality of the light, and I don’t want the light to wash out whatever color I go with. Blue? Green? Berry? I just don’t know…I could even go with a deep bright gold, but that might be just too regular-ol’-color, y’know?
