One of the first projects I’m tackling in our new house is repainting the living  and dining rooms. They’re the first rooms you see in the house, and while neither Steven nor I hate the current color, it’s not what we would have picked out. Here’s what it looks like now:

That ceiling fan/light fixture is definitely high on my hit-list, too. We’ve already picked out a fan-less replacement.

One of the things that made us fall in love with this house were all of the lovely little details, like the leaded glass windows in some of the rooms. Which reminds me of how narrowly they escaped destruction. A day after we put an offer on the house, some jerk kids broke in the back door and vandalized the hell out of it. Among other things, they smashed the glass in the built-in, the french doors and the window upstairs (the ones in the upstairs bedroom you can see here), and a bunch of the light fixtures, including the original chandelier in the dining room. The one in these photos is a replacement for the original 100-year-old one, which was much nicer than this one, but which was destroyed. Fortunately they left the leaded glass alone (maybe they had some reverence for beautiful things after all?), and our friend is buying a condo built in nearly the same year as our house, which has a beautiful chandelier very similar to the one that was ruined that she doesn’t want and is giving to us. Oh, and those little punks who vandalized the house were caught pretty soon after the crime. So all’s well that ends well, I guess, but I’m really glad they left these irreplaceable windows alone.

And hello, the little scallop detail on the built-in is the cutest.

The metal floor registers are no longer functional, but they have such character that they’re not going anywhere.

Okay, back to the paint. I envisioned a super dramatic, dark room like this one or this one or one of these. Steven was not on the same page, though, so we started talking about a dark blue, and we got a bunch of testers.

Which one did we pick? I thought I was compromising by going with three, but that was still too dark for Steven’s taste. So we decided to look at a few more colors, and we picked Benjamin Moore’s Van Deusen Blue (not pictured). Here are some rooms painted that color:

Top: left, right
Bottom: left, right
(I know it looks like completely different colors when you look at these side-by-side, but I’m assuming those are just lighting differences.)

Tomorrow I’m buying the paint, and then it’s time to get rollin’!