black out in a red room

For years before we bought our house I wanted a living room/family room with red walls. I had lived in too many apartments with white walls. Owning my own home would change that. I could paint the walls any color I wanted. And I wanted red. Ideally, I wanted a beautiful rich red with white trim and black furniture. Very modern. Very clean. Very cool.

That's not exactly what I got. Oh, I got my red walls alright. Beautiful red walls with streaks that were visible in the artificial light thrown down by the bulbs in the ceiling fan. Trim that was sort of white but not really because we never quite got to painting it. But not one bit of black furniture. More like a dark sandy color. Which was fine with me. It's great furniture and went well with the red walls, the hardwood floors, and the big creamy colored rug we bought when G-tot was just learning how to crawl.

So, for the past two and a half years I've had the red walls I've always wanted. The red walls that made our living room warm and cozy. The red walls that always seemed to require the addition of artificial lighting no matter what time of day. The red walls that were just too dark for our living room because of the pattern of the sun and the number of trees in our yard. The red walls that were a huge pain in the ass to paint.

The red walls that disappeared yesterday. At 9:00 p.m. JQ & I painted over each one of those dark red walls with primer. Two and a half hours later we finished. Now the room is really bright without a lick of artificial lighting and seems huge in comparison to the very same room with the dark red walls. The walls I had coveted for so many years.

We are by no means done with the room and when we finish it sometime this week the walls will not be white. But they will never be that rich dark red again either.