Progress in the Living Room

A few days ago, I posted a picture of a wall in my living room that I was painting, but I never got around to the "before" shot.  Here's what it looked like before I started:

This is the wall where I have my 'gallery' - paintings and other wall art I have created over the years, along with a few purchased items.  but the wall itself really never added anything to the personality of the room.  All the walls in this house were white until I started this project.  As of today, I have declared this wall in the living room all but done... the last thing I plan to do is paint and add molding and quarter round.  For now, here it is:

Couldn't do anything to disguise the smoke alarm, unfortunately!  But I definitely like the feeling from the warm color of "Spiced Pumpkin"!  Our carpet is dark chocolate, and this color goes really well with it.  Now for the rest of the walls... need to wash with tsp, then I will probably use a white that is really close to the original color... much easier to apply than the "Spiced Pumpkin"!

Score!!!!

So... you have to understand that normally, when I go to a Home Depot or other building supply store, it's usually not to buy things to use for projects around the house.  Those are my "Other" art stores!  But recently, I began a household project... painting the interior.  We have lived here almost 8 years, and I have only painted one wall in the house until recently!  So this week, I started painting the living room.  One wall is to be "Spiced Pumpkin", the rest will be off-white.  One challenge has been that the walls are "texturized", which means a lot more work to get even coverage!  Here is the first coat:

I know you can't see it from this shot, but there are lots of "holidays"... spots where the paint didn't cover the white below.  And I was using a roller to apply the paint.  Where I was trying to get the paint into the crevices, I spread it thinner than other areas, so the whole wall looked very splotchy.  Last night, I started thinking about maybe trying some "Faux Finish" techniques, and decided I would look at the store today to see what they had:

    SCORE!!!!!

Now, I had pretty much already decided that I would apply a second coat to the wall before deciding if I wanted to go to all the effort of using faux finish, and I have completed the second coat and am pleased with how it looks now.  But I absoloutely had to have this kit!  It's a Martha Stewart product, but I don't really car who made it... what I'm excited about is what I can do with these to create Complex Cloth!  Woo-hoo!!!  When I took Melly Testa's class in 2007, she suggested picking up faux finish tools for creating Complex cloth, but I never found any until today... I will definitely post pix when I have time to play with these!  In the meantime, I may also use them somewhere in the house on wall decor, but I'm thinking the texturized walls might be a bit of a challenge!  Anyone know how to remove the texture from walls?  Just kidding!