Although we fell in love with this Brooklyn apartment the same day we almost signed a lease for a different apartment, we did NOT love the colors. Or lack thereof. Both the walls and carpets screamed “blah!” Luckily, I love to paint and had some experience from the last Park Slope apartment. Also luckily, I learned an important lesson from painting that bedroom: leave the windows opened over night after painting! Even if the day warrants AC! I woke up that morning and could hardly breathe my lungs hurt so much. I think I even took off of work. It took me at least half the day before the lightbulb went on. I inhaled paint fumes for 8 hours! Ah the day I almost died from painting…

Because that bedroom was a light blue/purple (periwinkle?), with dark blue/purple on the moulding, we decided we wouldn’t do blue or purple again. Plus, the bathroom attached to our bedroom had about 5 shades of blue going on already. I read up on color schemes and painting advice, online and at Lowe’s. One particularly smart rule was that if you don’t see a lot of a certain color in your wardrobe, you probably won’t like it on your walls for very long. Red and yellow were out for this reason, orange was a little too bright, especially with the amount of sunlight we get. So, we decided on green. When I originally picked out paint strips, I saw an example of a striped wall and felt like I was up to that challenge. I chose the colors for the stripes, with Ian’s approval, and we proceeded. In addition, the kitchen screamed “blah!” too, so I chose a two shades of salmon. (I always loved that Crayola crayon).

I must say that I almost perished painting the kitchen because it was in the nineties that day, and although I had the one window open, that doesn’t really give much ventilation in a really tiny kitchen. I did a lot of painting in a camisole and underwear to avoid fainting. Here is a little before and after, from different angles:

A few pictures of the green bedroom, before and after.

And now for the striped office nook wall! Ian used tape to draw the lines, which we wanted to be of not uniform widths. I have no patience for tape, as I learned from the last apartment, so I free-handed this. Yes, that’s right, I painted relatively straight lines and loved it. Somehow, I had patience for that.