ONE ROOM CHALLENGE | WEEK FOUR: BLUSH PINK WALLS

If you’re visiting for the first time, welcome! Here are the links to catch up on Week One, Week Two and Week Three.

This week, rather like last week, feels like not an awful lot has been accomplished. I have repainted the door into the living room, tackled a little re-upholstery project (in a totally amateur way!) and built a piece of furniture I’m actually super excited about – but looking at the room nothing seems any different. Last week I talked about my frustrations in feeling like a lot of the work needed to wait until the plasterer could come (bring on May 2nd!) and how much of that work could I actually accomplish in a little over a week once the plastering was done.

I decided that this week I was going to pick up a couple of paint samples and finalise my choice of wall colour, after deciding I should just bite the bullet and paint the walls and hope they didn’t get too marked or bashed up when the ceiling was being skimmed or the coving installed. That turned out not to be as simple as I thought. My living room is the trickiest room in the house for lighting. The half of the room near the window is light and bright pretty much all day while the areas near the bookcase wall are somewhat…cave like? It’s dramatically darker at that side of the room and the light never really reaches those spots. I picked up two sample pots – but I’m not sure either of them really work throughout the entirety of the room so it’s back to the drawing board. I’m going to be on a mission tomorrow to pick up a tester pot of each of the colours below to see if any of them would be suitable. 

I’ve tried to include a pretty wide range of blush pink-esque shades. Some lighter and brighter, some more dusky shades – in case those play better in the shadowy parts of the room.

I picked up a tester pot Farrow & Ball’s Pink Ground which I thought would be perfect and one of Valspar’s Rabbit’s Foot in case I felt like a blush pink wouldn’t work at the start of the week. Here’s how they ended up looking on the walls…This is next to the bookcase wall, on the lighter side of the room – the other side is very shadowy.Here it is behind the sofa. And here is why I immediately ruled out Rabbit’s Foot. It’s a really pretty colour but looks totally insipid next to the hated sofa – which has to stay, because a new sofa is NOT in the budget, and is the bane of my life right now!). Pink Ground is lovely but I feel like it’s reading a little peach rather than pink in the room.And I’ve included this one because I think it represents how the colour changes so dramatically in the room. Top left is Pink Ground, bottom left is Rabbit’s Foot and then the bottom right is another patch of Pink Ground. So, focusing on Pink Ground – in the shadowy areas it’s looking kind of beige, in the average light areas it looks a little peachy for my tastes and then in the areas with bright light it’s…well, kind of, perfect actually. I’d pick it immediately if the colour consistently looked like that across the room.

So, in short – I have NO idea what colour I’m going to end up painting the room and we’re already at week four. I loathe myself. I’m toying with trying to get a tester mixed up of Pink Ground with maybe 50% more white added to see if it will come out as a white with a hint of blush pink. Who knows?

There is also the back up plan of painting the room white. Which I was dead against, thinking the darker areas would end up looking really dingy but the couple of tester patches I’ve painted actually look alright so…that’s an option if I get desperate. I do worry about the room feeling too stark if there is too much white in it though. I’m basically losing my mind about paint at this point.

The To-Do list is currently looking like this…

{PROJECT LIST}

• Electrician to change ceiling lights from two fittings to one
• Fit new ceiling light fitting
• Plasterer to skim coat ceiling
• Build bookcase wall
• New coving / crown molding
• Beef up baseboards / skirting boards (although this will probably have to wait)
• Paint walls
• Paint door
• Paint baseboards / skirting boards
• Decide on fire surround / mantlepiece
• Build picture ledge behind sofa (as per Chris & Julia’s)
• Reupholster / refinish vintage telephone table
• Build coffee table
• Bring in furniture
• Replace window blinds (budget permitting!)
• Decorate (cushions, artwork, rug etc)

So…hopefully next week there will be lots of visible progress in the room. Otherwise I’m in real trouble for meeting the reveal deadline. Wish me luck!

See you next week…

Don’t forget to check on the progress of the other guest participants over on Calling it Home.