Pintando La Casita

This past weekend and the better part of this week was spent taking on a home project that we've been dying to get done: painting our casita. We actually wanted to paint when we got the place a year and a half ago, but our time and budget was already stretched to its max with the whole wedding planning going on. We decided to postpone painting indefinitely. During this whole time I hated our white walls. They were so boring! We needed color, personality, style.

Finally, we decided that it was time. I had Spring Break coming up, and Mr. Tortolito had some vacation days to use. It was the perfect opportunity to tackle the painting project. When we first started looking for colors, we were leaning more towards bold, earthy tones. We def wanted some mango, browns, maybe some red. Then the hubby found this color palette from Sherwin Williams. It's so "us" - we loved it:

{via Sherwin Williams}

With these colors in mind, we headed to our nearest Sherwin Williams to stock up on paints. We made one more pit stop at Lowe's for supplies and we were good to go! Except, we really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. We don't have any experience painting walls or homes, or anything like that so we had no clue how labor intensive this project would be. And let me tell you - it was a lot of freakin' work! I'm not complaining; it was really a fun experience more than anything, but we were completely drained after 5 days of taping walls, trimming, painting a first coat, painting a second coat, removing tape, re-taping, fixing mess-ups, moving furniture, cleaning up etc. Ay ay ay... It left us with zero desire to repeat this process anytime soon, but we love our casita so much more now.

{Mr. Tortolito hustlin'}

Wanna see the results?

{Kitchen: before}

{Kitchen: after}

{Hallway: before}

{Hallway: after}

{Bedroom wall: before}

{Bedroom wall: after}

{We threw in a red wall, for good measure}

The best part of it all was how little it cost us to do the job ourselves. Mr. Tortolito had some Lowe's gift cards he got hooked up with at work that covered the cost of nearly all of our painting supplies. We spent about $250 on paint and extra supplies we ended up needing. Compared to the $1,500+ that we had been quoted by other painters, we saved a considerable amount I think! Not to mention, we got a good arm workout for 5 days straight. ;)

Now that our walls are all painted up it's time to move on to more exciting projects: decorating them! Up first is changing those hideous window blinds that came with our loft (I hate them!) But that's a project that will have to wait for another time.