A Little Blue, and So Happy About It

About 2 years ago (I think it was 2 years ago, it might have been 3), my husband had 4 days off from work. And we had recently had a bit of a leak in our dining room ceiling that was caused by a certain child who forgot that the shower curtain belongs inside the tub when taking a shower.  The leak meant repatching a section of drywall on the ceiling that was about 2×3 feet. We had been putting it off because there were other problems with the drywall ceiling. The joints and taping showed badly, so you could see the outline of every sheet of drywall, and it kind of drove us a little crazy. And my husband and I really don’t like drywall.

So, on this 4 day weekend that my husband had, with absolutely nothing else planned for the time, we ripped out the ceiling. The whole thing. Kitchen, dining room and a section in the living room (we had to do it all – all the rooms flow together and there was no stopping point.

The really nice part of tearing out all the drywall on the ceiling is that it gave us a chance to easily wire some recessed lighting for the space. Prior to that, the kitchen was lit with one central ceiling light and a track lighting fixture over the sink, and the dining room was a stained glass chandelier. Both rooms are on the north side of the house, and we live in Maine. So the lack of lighting was obvious.

Once we had the lights wired, we put up beadboard. The real stuff, not the sheets of paneling. SO much better than drywall!  And then we waited. We waited for time, and energy. We waited for winter – we needed the beadboard to shrink to its smallest size before painting it which happens over our winter heating season – real wood expands and contracts with the amount of moisture in the air. We didn’t want to paint the ceiling when it was in its expanded state then have it shrink over the winter and see unpainted lines along all of the joins.

And so, finally, last weekend we picked a color and went to work. It isn’t perfect (some of the marks from filling in the nail holes show more than I would have liked), but we LOVE it!

The color is Dolphin’s Cove by Benjamin Moore. It’s a blue that lands on the greener side of things (almost turquoise, but don’t tell my husband, as he professes to dislike turquoise).

As you can see, I painted the doors to the basement and the patio door as well. All the trim and doors in the house were stained pine, but we never cared for the color of the stain, and the wood putty used to fill the nail holes was much lighter than the stain. It looked like chicken pox to me.  My husband was hesitant to paint the doors, but once I did one of them, he’s ready to paint them all.

I think I’m going to repaint the walls a brighter white instead of the soft grey I have there right now. I think the grey looks fine, but I want brighter and lighter. It will have to be something that goes with my White Dove (Benjamin Moore) trim.

I think the blue really makes the artwork pop. I hadn’t realized before, but all our pictures have blues and greens in them.

I’m so happy about our blue ceiling!

P.S. I tried not to adjust the color in the photos much, so you can see what it really looks like. It’s a hard color for me to try to capture for you as it changes a lot in the light.