plum brown

As if we didn't have enough going on after deciding to install hardwood flooring, I also decided on a whim to repaint the playroom (i.e., technically our formal dining, but we're not "formal dining" people, so....).  Actually, we repainted the master bedroom too, but that was always in the plans.  More on that later!

We had visited some friends in St. Louis last summer and their house is ah-mazing!  He is an architect and has an amazing eye for design as well, so I pretty much drool over every.single.thing about their home.

Just a couple of things in particular were 1) their floors and 2) their foyer color.  The foyer color was a rich, beautiful dark color - not quite purple, not quite brown.  It is a Sherwin Williams color called Plum Brown.  I grabbed a chip and compared it to our current color scheme to see how it played in.

Above you can see the plum brown next to our great room color (BM's Camouflage), and to the right our yet-to-be-painted master bedroom color (BM's Silver Half Dollar).  This color is also planned for the kitchen, and because of our open concept, I want them all to mesh well.  I love them all together, so I went ahead and purchased the paint.  After having painted with BM in our great room though, I went ahead and had BM color match it for me.

Going on, to say it was a little different was a HUGE understatement...

Sorry for the blurry photo.  Anyway, once it was up and dried I had this:

I LOVED it!  It was exactly what I was going for.  And yes, the baby sat (and slept) contentedly in that carseat while I painted almost the entire room.  

We've now lived with this color for a little while, and I can say that I still love it just as much as the first day.  The floors are dark also, remember, so I was looking forward to getting lighter furniture in the room, a rug and art on the walls to brighten things up.  After now having that done also, we want to brighten it further, so we've decided to go ahead and put board and batten on the walls in this room also, which will be good practice for the basement.  That being said, we haven't done anything to "finish" the moulding in this room in the meantime.  

What do you think?  Do you have any bold colors in your home? Where?  

picking the floors

Picking the floors for us was a long process. We actually started looking at flooring during the fall/winter of 2011.  We looked both online as well as in showrooms locally.  Ultimately we decided last year that it just wasn't the right time, so we held off.  Some of that has to do with our money choices, which I'll share more about some other time.

One benefit of shopping local was service and the ability to see nice big samples that they would let us take home and return.  The samples were always a nice large size, so you could get a good feel for the flooring in your space.  Downside?  Price.  The prices locally were always far larger than online for similar woods (and in some case, the same wood).

The site we focusing our online shopping on was BuildDirect.  I first learned of this site when Dana over at HouseTweaking used it in her Underdog house.  I loved the look of her floors (see here), but felt that birch wouldn't hold up well to our three (two at the time we first started shopping) kids, one (two at the time!) dog and cat. We wanted something harder, more substantial, more dense.  What I loved about it was they would send you samples - as many as five - for free.  You could order more than five, but then just have to pay shipping.  Over the course of the two winters we were shopping we ordered LOTS of samples.

Once we were more seriously shopping it helped that Dana did a "how are they holding up" type post about her floors.  It was good to be able to go read about how she felt about the floors after living with them for a while, and honestly it sold us on BuildDirect even more.

Long story short, after looking at the samples, considering colors, and giving them all a "scratch and dent" test, and considering pros/cons of hardwood vs engineered, we opted for this maple coffee flooring from BuildDirect.

I never actually took any pictures of the sample we ended up choosing but did snap this pic once night after the flooring was here, acclimating and we were still prepping the surface:

If you look at the link to the flooring, you can also see beautiful variation in it, even though the overall color is quite dark.  

Next up, install!  

loooooonnnnnngggg break

Wow!  Did I drop off the face of the planet or what?  Meanwhile the pageviews on the blog have been crazy!  It turns out IKEA built-ins and painting a basement floor are popular projects.

SO much is going on here. I had a baby!

Isn't she lovely?  Harper Sage.  Born 4 hours after my water broke and was (surprise!) breech.  That was fun - though I strongly credit the fact that I do CrossFit with not having to push for very long.  Of course she's 5 months now and still sweet as can be.

And we're also going crazy with house projects.  I'll pick back up here but leave you with this teaser:

Yep, the carpet's coming out and floors are going in!  What a long process from start to finish - from picking the flooring to install (yes, we're doing them ourselves).  We're currently on day 52 of the install, but who's counting....

Back with details on how we picked the flooring next!