guest room sneak peek

You guys.  We finished our house.  I'm basically obsessed with it.  But before I get too carried away, let's rewind a moment, shall we?

We've known for quite some time we wanted to try to sell our house this summer.  Because of that, a good majority of the updates we have been doing were to a) improve the resale value, and b) help the house show better.  Well, we were just about to put our house on the market, but we still hadn't painted the guest room or the hallway/staircase upstairs.  At the time, I was getting so burnt out with house projects, that I kind of just decided we weren't going to paint those two areas and just leave them white.

However, the more time that passed, the more I was less and less ok with leaving them white.  Had they just been white, it would have been no problem.  But there were two major issues with these white walls.  First, when the house was built, I don't think they ever actually painted the walls.  I'm 99% sure that all that was on the walls was primer.  Second, there were marks all over the white walls from us and roommates moving furniture in & out.  So, around 10pm one night, I started painting.

Now here's the thing about me & painting; we have a love hate relationship.  I love it because it costs about $40 for a gallon and it completely transforms your room, and it's one of those projects where you see instant progress.  Basically, it's a cheap & quick update.  However, even though paint itself costs around $40, somehow I always end up spending $100 every time I paint.  So I'm determined to make that stop.  Part of it's my own fault because I HATE cleaning out roller brushes, so sometimes I'm lazy and throw them away when I'm done.  However, what really adds up is all the tape.  

For me, the blue painters tape never works.  I'll spend a long time taping and making sure everything is perfect, and then somehow, paint always manages to sneak underneath.  I know the trick is to paint over the tape in the same color as your ceiling or other wall, but that's just annoying & super time consuming.  The only tape I've ever had any luck with is frog tape, and let's be real, that stuff is expensive.  So in my quest to only pay $40 to paint from now on, I've decided to teach myself to cut in without using tape.  I figure I'll be painting enough in my life that it would be a good skill to have since it will save oodles of time & money.  

Well, after cutting in around all the doors and corners in our hallway (there are 6 doors I had to cut in around, 6 inside corners, plus all the trim and ceiling) I got pretty good at it.  By the time I made it to the guest room, I was going waaaay faster (and feeling awesome for not wasting money on tape).  The whole cutting in process did take a long time (primarily because I went slow at first so I didn't get paint on everything), but it was so worth it in the end.  And since I'm not going to spend an entire post talking about painting and then just show you a picture of the corners, here's a peek at our finished guest room.  

Now that the guest room is done, it's basically my new favorite room in the house.  It used to be the room where we stashed all of the junk we didn't know what to do with.  However, after some major purging, I was able to clear everything out, and find a home for everything we wanted to keep, so now the room is clutter free and feeling so fresh with its new paint job.  

Have you guys done any painting of you own recently?