New Year, New Carpet Stain

The Big Paint Debacle.

This is how our new year started.  We went to pick up paint for a kids' room on Monday and since we were at it husband asked if I wanted to paint an accent wall in the living room.  He knows how much boring white walls bother me, so of course I agreed.  We picked a nice deep sage green for the wall as it matches the curtains on the adjoining walls and would tie everything in nicely.  For the nursery we picked a light dolphin grey and I decided to paint the wall with a window a deep dark blue since it has a greyish curtain.

When we got home that evening we realized we had made a grave mistake...the accent wall in the living room had more too it than either of us had remembered.  We decided to see if we could make it work with what we had, and we *almost* did.  We called it a night and made a plan to get another quart the next day.

We get our quart, get home, and it's a completely different color.  Think "Packer green" compared to...what seemed to dry into army green.  Yuck.  We made ANOTHER trip into town with the plan to just go with a brown color but we soon realized that it was going to be harder than just covering it up.  We got our gallon of primer, and gallon of brown shade and went home, resigned to the project that went from "let's just knock out the accent wall tonight after we put the chicken to bed" to "oh my gosh I just want to get this stupid wall painted!".

We primed and decided while we were waiting for that to dry we would start on the babies' room.  We set up the plastic on the ground so as not to get paint on the light beige carpet (not my first choice but it was there when we bought the house) and taped off all the woodwork so we could get started.  As I was in the kitchen grabbing supplies I hear husband scream.  Immediately I thought he dropped the paint can on his foot and broke a bone or something.  Then I get into the room.  He had apparently been shaking the gallon of paint (not over the plastic) and dropped it and half the gallon had spilled onto the carpet before he righted it.  All I can say is thank God his foot WASN'T broken and thank God it was the light grey and not the dark blue.

Needless to say, instead of painting for the next couple of hours like I had planned I was hunched over, on my hands and knees, trying to scrub grey paint out of a close to white carpet.  Husband used the paint that had landed on the plastic to roll out one of the walls quickly instead of just letting it go to waste, so at least we got *something* painted other than the carpet.  He then went to the living room and rolled out everything, leaving just the corners for me since I'm much better at painting seems without going over than he is

At the end of the day the only thing that ended up getting done right was the living room.  That wall now looks fantastic.  I'm still waiting to see how dark the paint on the carpet is going to dry.  I have to say that I'm glad we both handled the mess without blowing up at each other.  I'll admit that after scrubbing for a while I just wanted to cry, but I didn't.  I held it together and just reminded myself that it could be worse, and that it's the children's room and the carpet isn't going to hold up to messes anyway.

So much for "vacation", ha ha.