Bed Stuy Reno

The most ridiculous part of painting our front parlor was the fact that we didn’t have any paint for it. Not specifically, anyway. We knew more or less what color we were looking for – G and I both felt that since we had gone bold with the back parlor, what would be our bedroom, that for the front parlor we were feeling something more light and airy. The idea was that the walls would be light, and that the moldings would pop subtly by being just a bit lighter. We still had a white for the moldings leftover from the back parlor (Benjamin Moore’s Swiss Coffee, in semi-gloss), but we did not have a paint picked for the walls.

We had a lot of leftover colors though. We had quart cans of orange, purple, yellow, and blue, all the crazy colors G had picked for the doors in the apartment on the top floor. (Which reminds me, I should do a post showing how the apartment turned out . . .) We also had large 5 gallons of the basic white by Behr’s you get at Home Depot. So, we just decided to go for it. We mixed. It’s hard to tell from the pics, because it shoots different in every picture, but the color we got was pretty much what we were looking for. Kind of a mayonnaise-y beige-ish light color with a lot of cream. And the white moldings subtly pop.

Again, it was one of those nerve wracking should-we-or-shouldn’t-we moments, but we went for it. The downside of course is that the paint can never be recreated if we ever need to touch up or put a fresh coat on areas. The upside was that we got a color we liked, and didn’t have to leave the house (taking away from precious production time) to get it. And of course didn’t need to shell out any more cash. For the moment.

The front parlor always served as the forgotten step-child in our house’s family of rooms. We used it for storing materials, tools, supplies, bath tubs, pianos, the usual stuff. Much like the rear parlor, we had to crank the front parlor out quickly all of a sudden, since G’s sister and her family were coming to town. G’s sister is married, with two little daughters, so we needed a lot more space. The front parlor is a large room, so the plan was to get it painted and sand the floors and let it serve as a bedroom.

The room had been sheetrocked, taped, spackled, sanded smooth, and in some cases skim-coated already. So prep work was a matter of moving all the remaining stuff into the middle of the room so we could access all the walls for priming. We primed everything, put up some trim around the front windows, reattached old baseboard trim that we had saved, put up some trim around the pocket doors that we added to the room, and G did some scraping of the pocket doors too.

Ok, so with the Kitchen mostly buttoned up, G and I moved upstairs to the back parlor room. This room was to become our bedroom, and we wanted it to be both warm and comfortable as a space. I had seen some images at the time of a bedroom with a bold grayish-green set off with some warm rich wood tones that I was really digging. We decided to search for our own bold grayish-green color, and thought that someday, when our fireplace was stripped (and the firebox rebuilt and working as a wood-burning fireplace, you know, sometime after that fireplace grant came through), it would act as the warm rich wood tone that would go nicely with the beautiful bold walls.

We looked through our Benajmin Moore color fan, and settled first on a color called “Durango,” which I was all for. It was deep and rich and almost a greenish brown, or brownish green, whichever you prefer. For the ceiling and molding colors, we wanted a white, but something that was also warm and rich itself. G liked a color I think called “Mayonnaise,” which is funny because in Belgium (where G hails from), they eat their fries with mayonnaise. But then we settled on “Swiss Coffee,” which I think is a winner as a paint name. We used a matte for the ceiling, and a semi-gloss for the moldings.

Once we had the “Swiss Coffee” picked, we sort of chickened out on the boldness of the “Durango,” and hedged to a lighter version of grayish-green, Benjamin Moore’s “Desert Twilight.”

We started first by getting all the crap we had been storing in the room out of the room. The focus had been on the Kitchen and Lower Level after all our work in the Apartment . The Parlor Floor, once we finished closing it up and dealing with the ceilings, was where we stored things that we didn’t know where else to store – tools, pianos, G’s giant puzzle-piece artwork, etc.

Once we had the room cleaned out, and radiators removed (heavy, heavy radiators) we began by painting the ceiling and one remaining area of wall that still had the picture molding and lincrusta paneling. Generally, when painting, I’m on rolling and G is on cutting in. Over time, we’ve both gotten pretty good at our roles, and can knock stuff out fairly quickly when we need to. We got the painting of the room done in one weekend, working a full Saturday and Sunday. (The room had previously been primed with the help of G’s friends.)

When it came time to get to the walls, we opened the can of paint and said, “well, here goes.” Along with the “Piano Concerto” of the bathroom, this was our boldest color yet on a wall (not withstanding the orange door in the apartment). But we were pretty happy with the results in the end, and thought the room looked both warm and inviting, but also somewhat sophisticated (at least by our broke-ass standards).