Foyer Makeover – Wilmington Tan to Balboa Mist

I have disliked the colour of my foyer (almost) from the day it was painted.  I paid an interior designer to come to my home and choose colours for me, and she chose this Wilmington Tan by BM as a compliment to other colours I had in the house – and it was.  Her choice was spot-on – together the colours looked amazing.  I had rich jewel tones on my main floor so this was a perfect compliment.

BUT, something about the light in my house, whether it be lightbulbs or natural light, brings out the yellow in any paint colour I choose.

Which made Wilmington Tan – a goldish-mushroom colour.  Not nearly as pretty as it was with all of the paint chips lined up.

Yuck!

However, since I’d paid a professional to choose the colour and then hired painters to apply it, I had to bite my tongue for awhile or risk Hubby’s wrath.

Fortunately (this time), no one in my house takes care of things – so the walls became chipped, dented, scuffed and marked and finally (now a few years later) I was able to make a case for a re-paint.  (Totally blaming them of course and not my poor choice to begin with).

I took some advice and put out a few paint choices to see how the yellow-tinge would affect each.  The top is Balboa Mist, the middle is Collingwood Grey and the bottom is Grey Owl – and sure enough each took on a different tone than what I saw on the paint chip.

We got a few estimates for the foyer makeover and they ranged from $3,300 (no trim or doors included – ahem, Heritage Painters) to $1,800 (trim and doors included – Yay Forest City Painters) and I was all set to go when Hubby “tricked” me.

He said that if we painted the foyer ourselves I would have all of that extra money that we’d saved leftover to shop at our friends’ warehouse sale.

Damn he’s good!

So we rented the scaffolding for both the main foyer and the stair-scaffolding and spent 4 days last weekend huffing paint fumes – and it sucked.

Uber-sucked.

Like, knees-back-shoulders-aching, covered-in-paint, can’t-stand-anymore-hair-rock-music kind of sucked.  (Hubby doesn’t like silence – he has to have music playing: 80’s hair-rock in particular – and it was all I could do not to stab him repeatedly with a fork while we were working cause “I’m not gonna take it…” lol).

But look how the foyer makeover turned out:

We had the main entryway to do which is two storeys tall, then wrap around stairs going both up and down and an upper and basement hallway to tackle.  On top of that, we tackled doors and trim in the upstairs hallway, the basement hallway and we re-did the stairs to get rid of some of the red oak.

I wanted to paint the risers as well, but then we would have had to remove the carpeting and stair tack strips, paint and then either replace the carpeting with the old (not worth it) or fork out more money for new carpeting… neither of which was that appealing.  Instead we primed and painted the side trim and look how much brighter and wider the steps look!

I can’t tell you how pleased we all are with the foyer makeover – it’s so bright and airy!  As much as I hate to admit it, it’s also a LOT cleaner – there were surfaces and objects that hadn’t been dusted in years.  (shame-face).  Now scuffs, scratches, dirt and dust are all gone.

Even our little Fairy Door got a touch up (bottom right corner) – mainly because Hubby put the scaffolding through it, but we’ll say it’s because our Fairy wanted a foyer makeover as well.

You know the famous scene where Julie Andrews is twirling on a mountain-top singing “The hills are alive…”.  That’s how I feel with this bright, beautiful and fresh space;  SO worth the work and almost worth the Twisted Sister migraine.

Have a great one!

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