Adventure orange & border hell

We took advantage of the weekend without the kids (seems so long ago, but I've been really busy) by painting our living room. Let me start off by saying anyone who ever considers putting up a border or wallpaper in a room should be dragged out and beat with a large rusty wrench.

Our room only had a border on it, but the one wall with the gas fireplace might as well have been carved into the sheet rock. That wall alone took me 6-8 hours to do and the section with a border was only 8 feet long or so... Thank god for captain morgan and the lovely concoction of spiced rum and diet coke. Also thank god that most of the longer side wall borders came up in 1 piece taking a fraction of the time of that fireplace wall. If it hadn't I was going to rip the wall down and start new. It would have been less work after all.

Back to the paint. My wife picked out a color she loved for the two smaller walls, kind of a tan/light brown that reminds me of a very light caramel. It goes really well with the fireplace and nearly matches the grout on the brick. The rest of the room needed a bright color because the old blue was sucking all the light out of everything. Enter a friend's wedding announcement that was on a orange backed paper... Why not it looks like it would go well. We then proceeded to get swatches and narrow down the selection to one called "Adventure Orange."

This was a big step since it is a much bolder color than either myself or my wife would normally pick. I've recently started liking orange-ish rooms though. We went to Home Depot and had them mix up the color for us: "It sure is an adventure..." the HD employee told my wife.

After priming, painting, painting some more and putting most everything back in place (we rearranged the furniture to change things up and focus on the fireplace a bit more), we have a very bright and cheerful room. It's a bit bold and we are getting used to it, but once we scrounge up some money to get a few more things on the walls and some decent curtains it should all come together.

The short end to this long story is that despite having 2 days sans-kids my hope to get some rest was replaced with the exhaustion of 2 days of genuinely hard labor. Next time someone offers to watch the kids, I'm just going to go to the beach or find someplace with a nice hot-tub to relax in.