Paint Can Fix It: Another Room Bites the Dust

Our downstairs has two family rooms. The one that I have already painted and fixed, and another one down the hallway. For along time we just referred to it as the second family room, sometimes we still do. But more often then not we refer to it as the "toy room".

Sadly this is the only true "before" picture that I have of it.

But...I do have a couple other from after we moved in, and...as long as you can disregard the mess, then we can be friends.

The closets in this room are great. They hold A LOT of stuff. The left closet holds all of my Etsy things,

the one on the right holds all of the kids toys. Well,...when they aren't strewed across the floor. I have found that keeping the toys all in one place makes for only one messy room instead of the whole house. That isn't saying that the house doesn't get messy....because...Oh, it does.

This room has had a lot of different furniture configurations since we moved in. We just couldn't figure out what we wanted.

One thing we did know? That we didn't want to have the room be all wood paneling.

Surprise, surprise.

I decided to start with the closet doors first.

They both got primed...

and then two coats of paint, and then the room sat.

Just like this. For a long time.

The wall across from the closet doors is only half of a wall and it was originally covered with wallpaper.

One day I decided that I had had enough.

So I started priming all of the wood paneling and the wall that had wallpaper.

Then, I painted it the same light grey color that is on our other walls.

Painting the wood and the trim around the doors was surprisingly time consuming. Painting one wall took me all day.

It probably didn't help that I accidentally had a little...er...big spill.

Thank goodness for a shopvac.

Once all the walls were painted it seemed to amplify how ugly the ceiling was. I don't know if it was because the new grey color made it look really dirty, or if the old brown paneling had distracted you enough from actually looking at the ceiling.
So the natural next step was to paint the acoustic tile ceiling. I am not really sure why I got such a wild hair, maybe it was because the whole room was grey and it was supposed to be a fun toy room, but it was decided.
The ceiling was going to be painted blue.

Why not add a little bit of character to a room?! It's just paint, right?
So I went to Home Depot and picked out a few colors and lined them up on the ceiling.
(the picture below shows the best of how truly ugly the ceiling was)
I like to look at paint colors on the wall in the morning, afternoon and evening to make sure that I have the best color for the space.
I ended up settling on the third from the left.

I wanted something that was clean looking but not neon at night with the lights on.
Its interesting, I thought that a blue ceiling would stand out more. You know...you walk into a room and it is like "Hey! Look at me! I am a blue ceiling."
But it doesn't. It more of a cool kid, "What's up. Yeah, I'm blue. So what?"

I hung up big pictures of the kids and put little frames beside them to hold quote bubbles that they can write in.

To the right of the kids pictures is a little hallway of sorts that leads to their "Laboratory." (More on that another time.)

I painted the side of the wall with chalkboard paint. The kids love it. So much so, that I always have a thin coat of chalk dust on all of the furniture in the room.