Living Room Refresh | After(ish)

Last week, while fighting off a lurgy and freaking out ever-so-slightly at the state of the house, we finished painting the brown wall in our living room green.

You all knew we’d paint that wall green, didn’t you? I mean, what other colour would I possibly go for? Other than white, obviously. Which is the colour (or, er, lack of colour, really…) we painted the OTHER three walls in the room.

The green in question is Farrow & Ball’s ‘Cooking Apple Green’, which we picked because it’s a nice, fresh shade, without being too lurid. This room gets a lot of light anyway, but we both felt the brown was a little too dingy (As I mentioned when I posted the ‘before’ shots of the room, our style is very light, bright and minimal. Very, very minimal…), so we wanted to make it feel light and airy, with just a few pops of colour here and there. When we embarked on this project, our plan was JUST to paint the brown wall. Somehow, though, painting that one wall turned into painting ALL of the walls, which turned into replacing the light-switch, which turned into replacing the blinds, which turned into buying new lamps, which finally led to me buying more cushions. It ALWAYS ends up with me buying more cushions, doesn’t it? Terry is in despair…

The painting of the wall was actually the easiest bit of the whole process. We started off with a coat of primer (Farrow & Ball Wall and Ceiling Primer and Undercoat), which we let dry for a few hours before cracking on with the Cooking Apple Green. The whole process took just a few hours from start to finish, and given that it took us about 15 hours just to decide on tile for our powder room floor, that was something of a triumph for us, let me tell you.

I should stress here that this room is still very much a work in process, and at the moment a few of the things we have in it are of the “until we can afford something better” variety. We STILL haven’t gotten around to putting anything on the walls (other than paint, obviously), but we DID purchase some frames at the weekend, which we’ll be using for some of our own photos. Just don’t ask which ones – THAT decision will probably take another few months at least.

We also made a little timelapse video of the wall paintin’, which you can see below. It’s LITERALLY as interesting as watching paint dry, though. Because it IS watching paint dry. I’ve no idea how I’m ever going to follow this, but I’ll do my best. In the meantime: enjoy!

[This post is a collaboration with Farrow & Ball. All opinions are my own, as are any strange patchy bits on the wall…]