A New Coat of Paint

A new coat of paint can work wonders for even the dingiest of apartments. It didn't help that the last tenant here not only left a crapload of her stuff in our new pad, she also was a HEAVY smoker. Meaning, the walls were covered in a yellowish, stinky film of stains, and the heavy odor of stale smoke greeted you as you walked through the doors.

My fiance has a perpetually stuffy nose, so this didn't bother him much, but I couldn't bear the sight of those gross, old-looking walls and smoke clinging to the insides of this place, so I asked our new landlord for a fresh new coat of paint. Unfortunately, she was going to paint it the same off-white-kinda-yellow paint, which did NOT work for me, nosir, so I begged to get some colors in there.

I was limited to Glidden paints because of the amount of money they wanted to spend (or rather, not spend) on my new color dalliance, but I did the best I could given Glidden's limited selections.

First off, my latest obsession is finding the right shade of grey to paint a living room. LA is rife with these faux fireplaces, which some people find tacky, but I--coming from New York City, where everything's cramped and people live with bathtubs in their kitchen--find them kind of cute, even if non-functional. In particular, white fireplaces against a grey wall--swoon! But there are so many shades of grey out there--some with tan undertones, others with blueish/purpleish undertones. And the paint chip you choose in the store can look tooootally different when it's splashed across your wall and in the sunlight of your living room.

Here's my old place. I used Behr Silver Screen.

Before

After:

It's a little bit blown out here by the sunlight, but you can see the difference.

You can see it better here, if you can pry your eyes away from Mila Kunis's hot bod on the cover of GQ. It turned out way bluer than I expected it to in the sunlight, but was nice and grey in artificial light. For my new place, I decided to go with a tanner undertone, something closer to Behr's Dolphin Fin.

Next post: See how the Glidden worked out!