Never to Return to the Red Room

I'm sorry for my absence and sporadic posting. I've certainly missed being here on a regular basis, but it has been a busy (and a bit stressful) the past few weeks here at Front Forty Farm.  It's amazing how much goes on in a day with twelve people, of all different ages, living under one roof.  I wake in the morning with plans to accomplish certain things, but by 9:00 am most of those plans have been thrown out the window, and new ones have taken their place.  We all have cabin fever and are ready for a change. We are ready for spring.  It's coming, I know, but with snow, wind and single digit temperatures again this past weekend, it certainly didn't feel like spring. We remain hopeful, though, knowing winter never lasts forever. One of my cures for cabin fever, as some of you probably know from past posts, is cleaning, tidying and changing things up a bit in the house, so I decided it was finally time to change the "red room", time for a lighter, more cheerful color. Time to actually do it!

Remember the red?

The color is "Cargo Pants" from Sherwin Williams. It's a lovely greyish-green...just enough green to keep the grey from being drab, but not so much green that it actually looks green.  Does that make sense?  I absolutely love the color and the change it brought to this room.  And the best part?  The change only cost us the price of one gallon of paint.  Hubby has a stash of paint in the basement that he has saved from past construction jobs, and we looked through the colors he had.  I was skeptical at first, not thinking he would have a color that was suitable.  If I was going to put all that time and effort into painting the "red room", the new color had to be just right.  I was pleasantly surprised, though, when we found a gallon of "Cargo Pants", and was even more surprised when I found that it only took two coats of that light color to cover the heavy, dark red.  We only had to purchase one more gallon of paint.

It took me about a month to complete the project because I could only work on it on Saturdays when we all took a break from school lessons.  I kept my goal to one wall at a time, so that I didn't feel overwhelmed by the immensity of the project, and I finally put the finishing touches on it this past Saturday.  I am so pleased with the results.  The room is fresh and airy, and it brightens my spirits whenever I walk into it.  I picked a few branches from my forsythia bush and put them in a vase of water on the piano, hoping to force the buds to open.  For now the "red room",which, thankfully, is no longer red, is my breath of fresh air, my "spring "amidst all the snow and mud.