Painting the Upstairs

One project we wanted to finish before the carpet arrived was the upstairs painting. We actually finished this project prior to painting the subfloors blue, but I'm just now getting to blogging about it. Better late than never. You've even already seen the 'after' pictures with the carpet installed. But here the pictures are anyway.

We wanted to finish this project up before carpet so that I wouldn't have to worry about paint getting on the carpet later.

The original wall colors upstairs weren't my favorite but they weren't that bad. However, we were concerned the bad smell of the house may have settled into the paint on the walls. Repainting the walls will seal any bad smell into the wall. Anyone who has lived in a house that belonged to a smoker will tell you that the best way to get rid of that lingering smoke smell is to paint the walls.

I used a 5 gallon bucket of Valspar in "Pale Blossom" eggshell. It's basically a beige version of white. It's a great neutral. Since I was planning on painting pretty much the whole upstairs the same color, I figured it should be a very neutral color. I don't want to be sick of it later.


I was really pleased with the coverage I got from this paint. This picture shows how well the paint covered this medium purple on the very first coat:


That purple room did require a second coat, but since the other rooms were already light beige colors they only needed one coat plus touch-ups here and there.

The whole place looked whitewhite once I finished since the trim, walls, and floors were all about the same color. It was a huge improvement. It looked so clean! Once I painted the trim with ultra white, the walls settled into the background a little more.

Here is Heathrow offering his approval.

One bedroom ended up painted blue-gray, because I was worried I was running out of Pale Blossom paint. I got the blue paint from the "oops" bin so it was a bit of a risk, but it ended up being a soft blue-gray. It's lovely in person; I got lucky!


The room was originally yellow. . .
Yellow no more! The toilet was uninstalled from the bathroom and living in this room because I was preparing to tile at the same time. So busy!!

Heathrow is keeping an eye on the other important tools while I work.

Here is one bedroom after being painted and having carpet installed. You can see I missed a spot--haha, oops!

What do you think of the transformation? Do you like the super-neutral? I'm on a beige kick these days, I just want beige and white everywhere. What are your favorite colors this season?