benjamin moore | Hicks House

Continuing with our painting, we’ve tackled perhaps the most complicated area yet: the hallway. The hall goes from the kitchen/living room to the front door up the stairs then down to the bedrooms. As I outlined in this post we selected Benjamin Moore’s Revere Pewter for the hallway.

Originally I was completely convinced that I wanted Revere Pewter in the kitchen/living room area. After looking at the swatch in various areas of the room, I loved it in the kitchen area and was underwhelmed in the living room. While it looked perfectly greige against the dark counters it looked much to beige against the oatmeal colored chairs and the curtains we’ve already purchased that pull in more of the oatmeal color.

However, we both really liked the color and hated to not use it somewhere. The perfect solution seemed like the hallway it would help tie in a lot of the more gray colors we’d chosen with the beige carpet that’s upstairs in the bedroom. However, before we could start there was A LOT of prep work to do, much more than in the dining room.

Instead of nail pops there were lots and lots of screw pops that looked like this:

See the screw trying to work its way out of the wall? The big problem with this is you can’t patch it as is… you have to dig the drywall off the screw –

then tighten the screw –

then patch the screw –

Allow the compound to dry, sand it then repeat 2 to 3 more times. Needless to say that took a couple of days. Once that was complete the cutting in could start. Ken set up an adjustable ladder on the stairs so that he could get to the ceiling above the stairwell.

this made me kind of nervous… glad I didn’t have to get up there. I’m not comfortable with heights and this probably would have made me hyperventilate. Luckily Ken is braver than I am and accomplished this while I was at work.

Once he got to this point and I arrived home we kind of just stood there and stared it a while. What we were both thinking is “Uh Oh… this looks DARK.” We both thought it would be lighter. But we bought several gallons of this color so no backing out now… the cutting in must continue!

Once it was complete we were both still a little unsure. Did we make a mistake? Is it going to be really dark? This is such a large portion of the house what if we don’t like it? Is it really as dark as it looks, or does it appear dark because we’ve been living in a white box for so long? (I was hoping this was the case.) Only one way to find out roll it and finish it – reserve final judgement until its done.

Good thing we forged on because it’s awesome.

I love how it pops off the white trim, and once the entire wall was done it didn’t appear too dark at all. For comparison sake here is where the hall meets the dining room (also a great shot of how annoyingly close the window is to the trim… but that’s another story)

We’re very excited that we’re starting to inject some of our personality and style into the place!

If you’ve been keeping up and read my last post you know that we bought all new paint colors for the house. While picking out the colors and bringing them home hand me ~~jumping up and down like an excited school girl~~ ready to jump right in and start painting – my more practical counterpart ensured we did the proper prep.

We collected all of the painting supplies we had leftover from when we painted the condo (see here, here, and here) and laid them out on the dining room table to see what we had and what we needed. Then Ken went around the room with a flash flight (the lighting in there is currently a single bulb in the center of the room – thus very very bad) to find any imperfections (paint drips, globs, popped nails) in the wall so that we could mark them to be sanded down.

Inspector at work

Then we covered the dining room table in a tarp which I think made it look like a Dexter Kill Room

Perhaps it is.. Afterall this is the Room the Builder Grade White Paint Came to Die dun dun dun… Thanks to the Master Hide (seriously that is the name of it) paint the builder used there were actually quite a lot of imperfections; some we had noticed previously, some we had not. They were all sanded down and the ones that needed it were compounded then sanded down again.

Thankfully the builder ~~was nice enough~~ too lazy to move the paint out and we used it to go over the sanded spots bringing it back to a nice smooth even colored surface. Had we been priming this step might have been unnecessary however we are using the builder white paint as a primer level and didn’t want any discolored spots showing through.

After the “primer” dried I worked my way around the room with a ladder cutting our chosen color (Coventry Gray by Benjamin Moore) in while Ken taped off around the doors and windows. Including this nice teeny tiny area between the window and the door. Seriously what were they thinking when they put these things so close together?

tiny space between door and window

Not only does it complicate the painting (I had to use a tiny craft brush) but it creates a conundrum on how exactly we are going to hang a curtain rod here. We have some ideas but are definitely open to suggestions as well 🙂

Once the taping was done and I was about 3/4 through the room with the cutting in process Ken rolled the walls. This is a decent sized room and we really wanted to try to get it done in one coat and with one gallon. (paint for an entire house is expensive) Lucky for us we had decided to go entirely with Benjamin Moore paints for our house – a brand we had never used before – and learned you definitely do get what you pay for with paint. The Benjamin Moore paint covered much thicker, didn’t come off the wall if you rolled over a still wet painted area and had a much more even coating we couldn’t see the roller or brush marks after the one coat which is something that always bothered us with the “bargain paint” when painting the condo.

We made it by the skin of our teeth, there was merely a drop left in the bucket once the first coat was done. I wasn’t able to get very good pictures due to the ~~crappy lighting~~ single bulb and the fact that the kill room will be set up until all the rooms are complete; but you can get the general idea for now.