Guests in the Attic

I have been thinking of Aqua lately because of my recent last-minute makeover of our last guest room. Before my sister and a friend stayed with us to attend a wedding a few weeks ago, I got it into my head that I'd paint our third and last guest room, the cute one on the third floor in the front of the house that has a charming view of our garden. It was already a sweet little room. Great light, awesome vaulted ceilings, very cozy:


But kind of...granny. I'm not sure you can quite appreciate from this photo that the walls were sponge painted in two shades of pink, ("Mama, mah colohs are Blush and Bashful"). That gave it a kind of creepy flesh-like color.

I figured that I could bang this room out over the course of a few weeknight evenings, and hey - we even had an extra gallon of the reject color from another guest room. I slapped some up on the wall to see if it would work (you can see a few test strips in the photo above). It didn't. So we dumped our bag of paint chips out onto the floor and picked one that looked sort of pale greenish-blue. Carolina Aqua something.


It was also not quite right. Here's half the damn room painted in it, since I was just so determined to get this room done. But it's a little anemic, no? We, apparently, are completely unskilled when it comes to picking room colors. So we went back to that old maven of good taste and style: Martha Stewart. Her paint line at Lowes has not disappointed us yet. And we also stopped mucking around with wimpy pastels and pulled a real Crayola out of the box.

As Jason would say, BAM!


It's called Tulip Leaf and we like it a lot. The trim is Valspar's Chef White. We got rid of the granny rug, too, and for now the floor is just bare. This is great because these floors are so cool and old and attic-y anyway.

It's interesting to look at the progression of colors for this project: Blush&Bashful, Blah, Meh, and BAM!


And so many lessons learned!: We do not like pastels. Lowe's "Historic" line is totally unreliable (and questionably historic). We are strangely attracted to aqua. And Martha Stewart wins again.