Spring Cottage’s Makeover

I was colour-scheming last week, having decided that my poor old living room was looking a little bit tired and bland. It has been suffering old-cottage-itis, which is generally speaking where it gets painted cream, gets a little bit grubby the way cream-coloured stuff does and began to slowly blend in with all the other similar shades and tones in the room, by looking generally bland and nondescript.

It was a CATASTROPHE! Spring Cottage is not a nondescript sort of a place. It’s a kick your shoes of, hi there love and how’s it going sort of a place. So after a bit of umming and ahhing, I embarked upon a trip to B&Q (as an aside, you have to love this place. It’s a DIY shop where the employees don’t know what a mirror plate is) for lots of sample colour pots in varying shades of blue. Just incase you hadn’t gathered from the pictures of the kitchen, I REALLY love blue. I’d even got the chap in the shop to mix me up some paint shades that weren’t already premixed.

With a foolhardy attitude of ‘well, if I don’t like it, I can always paint it back’, I embarked upon the colour squares. The wall metamorphosed from a scruffy white to a patchwork of every shade of light and mid-blue under the rainbow. I wanted a nice light blue, a few shades lighter than the kitchen that wasn’t a particularly cold blue but one that would lighten the room and give the other elements of the room a real lift. I settled on a colour-mix shade called Holiday Blue (6), went to get the mixed up pot and got cracking. (For those contemplating how much paint you need to paint a room, a 250ml can should do the trick)

Since I was clearly in the mood for adding to the room, I knocked up a couple of quick cushions a la Kirsty’s Homemade Home to highlight the ambience as well with old fabrics I was given through Freecycle.

A day and a half later (and post paint fume induced craziness), here are some pictures of the results (the blue’s faily subtle so you probably don’t get the full benefit through the photos):