It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a house project on the blog, and this project has actually been done for awhile now.  But I’m going to let you in on a little secret for all of the people that think my house is spotless all the time.  Boy do I have you fooled.  I haven’t posted this blog for the last month cause that means that I would have to have every room upstairs cleaned AT THE SAME TIME!  No, I do not live in a magazine.  It’s real life people.  Blogs are deceiving in that way:)  Do.not.be.deceived.  I’m just like the rest of you:)  I have had my upstairs cleaned a couple of times when companys come over, but it’s usually always at night, which mean the lighting stinks and I can’t photograph it.  So today my project was not just to blog, but to clean the upstairs SO I COULD BLOG:)  Oh the life of a blogger:)  It’s rough folks.

Ever since I painted my hallways upstairs and the huge stairwell wall, I didn’t like the color.  I thought I should pull in a bit of a more dramatic color since the rest of my house was so light, because I didn’t want to be, dare I say, boring!  So instead of an actual color, cause that’s just radical, I did a dark gray.  The problem was that it had a really strong green hew that I never liked and and made our hallway really dark.  I had planned on changing it for awhile, but like I said, it was our stairwell wall, the really tall wall that I needed to haul the big ladder in for, the one I HAD to inquire the help of the hubby with.  That always holds me back a bit:)  Here’s a picture mid process where you can see the color I had that I didn’t like…

This is the most accurate picture of hte color, except it was on all the walls.  I was prepping here for the board and batten that I wanted to put up in this hallway.  Note to self, it is MUCH easier to paint BEFORE the boards go up and touch up AFTER.  I’m learning here folks.  The walls sat prepped like this for about two weeks before I actually got around to the boards. Whoops.

After I painted the white I bought my wall paint and painted the upper.  I chose a Behr color called Gray Mist or something along the lines of that, I’ll have to double check, but I loved the light gray color it was.

The boards were brought in and getting ready to go…

I did the height about 2/3 of the way up the wall.  I knew I still wanted to hang pictures so I didn’t want to go too high.

Then I had to call in the help.  All of these angles in the hallway are not 90 degrees.  Allie doesn’t do angles.  I sweet talked the hubby into helping and he was an all star:)

Hard at work.  Lookin good babe!

p.s. He also helped with this corner, cause I just couldn’t do it.  I start getting all shakey that high up and go into a cold sweat.  Who knew Ryan could paint?? This could be dangerous:)

I’m not going into the details of the board and batten on this post, since I did that here , but it actually is really easy to do.  We did all of this in one night, probably about 2 hours.  Just putting the boards up that is, I had it all prepped and painted before that:)

I was loving the look, although it did make the hallway seem a bit narrower yet.  We’ve gotten used to it though:)  And it has brightened up this hallway and our whole upstairs A TON!

After it was up I patched the holes, gave it it’s final coat of white paint, and caulked all of the seams until I could caulk no more!

Oh and took a month to clean the upstairs to bring you these pics:)

So much brighter!

** Anyone notice some changes in the bathroom?? More to come on that …..

The white also flows so much better into the kids rooms’ now.

My intentions were to put up frames to showcase the kids artwork in this hallway.  And I did it.

and I realized I just.can’t.do.it.

Although I truly love their artwork, it’s just too bright for the flow of the house.

So it might just go back into the portfolios.  I’ve been seeing walls like this lately that I love!

Although I wouldn’t want all of my frames to match, I love how these go over the door and everything…

more like this.

But I also love how these seem to effortlessly wrap around the corner.

and this…

So, we shall see what comes of it, for now I’m just super excited to have the board and batten done…and to have a clean upstairs;)