Blazingly White

So you know last post when I proudly showed you our "new" bedroom?

I got that post up just in time, because two days later this is what my bedroom looked like:

And this:

And part of the sewing room looked like this:

That's not to mention the piles underneath the desk. Or the piles behind the chair. Or the general crap-dump going on in the front of the sewing room:

My house looked like several tornadoes had come through (if tornadoes can be concerned with organizing books by genre and author) because in the living room I was doing this:

And this:

You see, Camelback (by Sherwin-Williams) and I were parting ways. It was a good neutral that had served me well, but I had been itching to change it for some time. I was over its warm tones, and I was sick of my walls, furniture, and floors all matching. I was swimming in a sea of tan. I needed change.

(I did this completely against my husband's wishes. I just feel the need to admit that. Not that he really cares about the color, per se. He just didn't see why I needed to go to a bunch of trouble to change something that was, to his mind, perfectly fine. As in "not crappy and broken," like a lot of other things are when we tackle renovations around here. I see his view, but I respectfully think it's stupid.)

It was a tedious, cranky job because a) I had to work around our high and very detailed bookshelf, which is, for all intents and purposes, built-in; b) I was doing it on my own (see above note regarding spousal uncooperation); c) I didn't prime (stupid) and therefore had to apply three coats; and d) I was painting not only the largest room in our house, but also our small hallway and our entryway.

Also, everyone chose last week to get furiously ill. B actually burst an ear drum the night I was wrestling with the final coat. IT WAS INSANE.

But I got it done! The final product is...stark.

I chose a white called Pegasus by Olympic, and I'm really happy with it, starkness and all. I wanted a neutral that wouldn't look outdated in 10 years, and as much as I like gray, I'm not predicting longevity for it. White is as neutral as you can get, and I had seen lots of rooms done in white that really appealed to me. Of course, they have usually had years (or money) to accumulate lots of funky, personalized wall decor to temper the starkness, so I'm giving myself time. It's going to stay stark for awhile. I'm telling myself to be okay with this.

It's all very...echoey, what with the few hundred books who normally call this room home out on vacation. We seriously have a lot of books. The classics a portion of sci-fi are housed in our bedroom, in case you need to borrow a book or something. And all the shelves in the dining room are still intact. Oh geez.

Oh, and we've created a little conundrum for ourselves in the form of the hallway alcovey guy in between our bedroom and the bathroom. It used to house two tall, thin Billy bookshelves from Ikea, full to the brim with mostly sci-fi, but when we took them down to paint we realized they had been hogging nearly all the space in the hall. We had been toying with the idea of building something nicer to replace them, but when we saw how much hallway we had been giving up just to house them, they were definitely out. Now the stubby hallway looks so blank and bare.

And we're still veering to the left when we make potty trips in the middle of the night. Old habits die hard.

We're considering more above-the-door, hidden book storage in there. Or floating shelves on the wall? Again, we're taking it slowly. Sure, we want sci-fi back in its place, but we want to do this well and use our small space wisely, unlike before.

So that was my week after New Year's. Now the kids are back in school, ear drums NOT bursting, the walls are most definitely white, and I have to balance on the loveseat to get T.S. Eliot back in American Poetry.

Here's where I'd make a Prufrock or "Wasteland" joke, but that seems really stupid in a snobbish sort of way, and also I'm tired and keep tripping on the volume of Little Women that's near the foot of my bed and my walls are very very white and ZOMG, what was I thinking, I have kids.

The end.