We have permission to paint!

You guys.  We got permission to paint!  You might have seen in a few pictures of our house, but when we moved in the walls in the dining room and living room looked like this.

YIKES.  And we were told by our property manager that our landlords loved it, and there would be absolutely no painting.  Eeek!  So, our temporary solution was to cover as much wall space as we could with drop cloth curtains.  (Which, by the way, is a crazy affordable way to get beautiful, full, weighty curtains, already cut to size.)  I think it helped, temporarily, and having curtains hung so high and wide made our windows look much larger than they actually are.

So anyways, the other day, something AMAZING happened.  Jon got into a conversation with our landlord (who happens to live next door, and who we have been becoming friends with), and invited him in to show him the pallet wood bookshelf.  Jon casually led the conversation to painting the walls, and our landlord actually said YES!  It was cute, he said something like, "Well, seeing what you've done with the place, I know you won't paint it a deep purple or something like that...so, sure!  You can paint."

We made it our date on Friday to track down cans of oops paint at Home Depot and Walmart.  Look at our samples!

This is right by our front door.  We ended up finding a pre-made color at Walmart called "Country White," which was really pretty as-is.  I had my heart set on a grey color though, so rather than getting that mixed, we just got one of those 50 cent bottles of craft acrylic paint in black to mix in with our white.  (That's the grey patch above the white).  Google told us that it's ok to mix acrylic paint and latex paint, because they are both water soluble.  I actually really liked how it turned out, too.  So, if you want a very very inexpensive way to get just the right paint color, there you go : )

We decided though that it would be best to go with the white, both to honor our landlords (we wanted to be very very neutral), and we loved how fresh and clean it looked.

On Saturday night, we started with our dining room!

Oh, mercy.  Those walls!

Only two of the walls were actually sponge painted (huh?) so we had to use a couple of coats on those walls.  Everything else was SO fast!

And here is the blurry late-night phone shot of the finished room : )  SUCH a difference!  Here she is all put back together, in better light.

I wanted to hug the walls : )  It's the little things.  Also, I need to tell you about the elements in this room, because it's such a sweet picture of redeemed things making a space beautiful.

Curtains: Drop cloths (9x6) from Home Depot
Chandelier: Southern Thrift in Nashville (this was in the living room of the home I lived in with Katie in Nashville!  And it may have been spray painted in our basement...)
Chairs: Goodwill outlet (spray painted)
Table: Goodwill outlet (It's a Henredon table!  We found it for just $20.  We were pretty excited.)
Bench: A gift from Dad when he was moving out of his office in San Diego (and originally from a consignment store in San Diego).
Flowers: From our landlords : )

I think we maybe spent $60 on this room?  If even that!  Point being, making rooms feel special and beautiful to you has absolutely no correlation with a large budget.  We have had SO much fun making the things in here ours by redeeming broken things!