The "pain" in painting......

I finally started. YAY me!! I got 'the wall' sanded and primed and the whole downstairs taped, ready to go, and then went to Wal-mart to get paint. I opted not to go all the way to Home Depot, Wal-mart (the devil) is much closer and cheaper. So I get the pretty much non-paint mixer guy mixing the colors, which made me nervous, and the fact that he did'nt know how to really just color match what I had brought so I had to pick new colors, and just hope for the best. We tried to match them as best we could, but thats pretty impossible. I used 2 gallons on my room upstairs, and the rooms downstairs are bigger so I'm thinking, ok, cheap paint, I better get 5 gallons of each color (5 beige, 5 tan) just to be safe. So the guy (who is foreign) is trying to mix it up for me (sloooooowwwwwwllllyyyyy) and he asks for the tan "you want Satan??" which of course he means Satin as in finish. I say yes, and 15 minutes later I realize he's mixing the 4th can.....in flat. But it is for the front room, so I guess I'll live with it. At least it will look really nice and it will cover well. I know he would have redone it, but I had Mark with me (because he loves picking out paint colors...har har and I had Sadie and her friend with me that were driving me crazy. I just had to get out of there.

So I get painting, starting with the front room. The color is about a whole shade darker than what I had originally wanted, but for a shot in the dark it's actually pretty good. And, the paint thats already on the wall is serving as a good base coat, so the paint was covering great. It was pretty runny, which scared me at first, but it was working well. I realized that it was a bit dark, and now I'm realizing that the beige I picked is probably pretty dark as well.....so now I'm changing the game plan. Another surprise....I used ONE gallon. Thats all it took for my entire front room. How wierd is that. OK now now I have 4 gallons of tan and 5 still of the beige. I probably have enough to do my entire house now!! The only problem is that the tan is flat paint. So now I have to figure out if I mix the flat tan with a semi-gloss base, will I get a lighter shade in an eggshell/satin?? Because I'd like to do that in my other downstairs family room now. I can use the beige upstairs to cover up the blue.

And if is sounds like I'm being SO boring with my beiges and tans......wait till my red accent walls go up....pictures coming soon :D