Are you ready for some COLOR?!?

I’ve been SO excited to show all of you our colors for the new house but wanted to wait until the paint was on the walls…and now it is 🙂 Here’s a reminder of our house plans if you need to see them!

If you’ve ever been to our current home (at least prior to repainting to sell) then you know Zach and I LOVE color. I love for people to walk into my home and be surprised, in a good way, at what they see. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to many of your homes and the ones with tan walls are pretty. They just aren’t me and I want our new home to be unmistakeably OURS!

That being said here’s what all our interior paint looks like, what inspired the color choice, and even the paint swatch I chose from Lowes…I can’t wait to hear what all of you think!

1. Main Living Areas: This was the very first inspiration for the new house. When we first decided to move, one of the main things I was worried about it how we would pick a color as fun, vibrant, and modern as the lime green we had in our main living areas. We wanted our new house to be modern yet also beachy and I happened to see this place mat in our pantry (we got it for our wedding and have NEVER used them!). It instantly became the colors for our new house and the item I took with me EVERYWHERE I went when picking house choices:

I took it to Lowe’s and decided on this color for the darker teal

and this for the lighter

We decided to do the lighter color in the garage entry, laundry room, kitchen, breakfast nook, through the hallways, on the upstairs hallway, on the top section of the living room and on the ceiling in the dining room. The darker color we decided to use in the front entry, dining room, all the way up to the second story from the front entry, and on the bottom portion of the living room. I LOVE it and seeing it in person makes the house look like OUR HOME! My goal was to have every other room flow off the main colors and I wanted it all to look like separate spaces yet part of the same theme. I found this great brand at Lowe’s that was all sea colors so I tried to pick all the swatches from that so they all went with the teals we had picked for the main areas.

kitchen

 breakfast nook looking into living room

 living room (you can click to make larger to see the pretty molding)

 looking down into living room from upstairs balcony

 looking down to front entry from upstairs balcony

 dining room (aren’t you in LOVE with the ceiling?!?! Omg I totally am!)

2. Nursery: Choosing a nursery color was going to be tough. I mean I’m not even close to being pregnant yet so I had to basically go ahead and decide on a theme for a baby we haven’t even created and a sex that we are (obviously) clueless about. I have REALLY loved Kye’s shark pjs and wanted to use those colors in the house somehow (remember this blog post with the adorable pictures of him in them?). I decided (with Zach’s approval, of course) to use the brighter blue color on the walls. If we have a boy we’ll pick up the rest of the colors and do a shark theme (wouldn’t that be cool?) and if it’s a girl I think it’ll look beautiful to add hot pink and white and do mermaids!


the paint swatch

it’s VERY bold…but I think it’s going to look BEAUTIFUL with the white furniture from Kye’s room (Kye will be getting big boy furniture once it’s time for him to move to a bed and we plan to use his white stuff for ALL our babies…if it holds up that long!)

3. Downstairs Guest Bathroom: I’m really anti-children themed bathrooms. I think it’s cute in bathrooms that are attached to the children’s bedroom and not used by guests but since our downstairs bathroom will be the one we use for the younger kids and the one everyone who comes over will use, I wanted to go with something fun yet adult appropriate. When Zach and I went to San Diego we both fell in LOVE with the duck centerpiece we won at one of the Aflac dinners. We wanted to use it somehow in our current house but it just didn’t fit so we stuck it in the attic and decided to make sure we could use it in the new house!

Here’s the paint swatch we went with

I’m a little nervous about finding a matching shower curtain but I was thinking since the wall color is so bright that maybe just getting a white curtain and having it embroidered with our monogram in the colors to match the duck would look good???

4. Kye’s Room: If you haven’t noticed I pretty much made sure to base our colors off of a physical object that would be in the room we were painting. When it came to Kye’s room I have NOTHING to go from. Sure we’re pretty decided on what furniture he will have (the Camp Bunk System from Pottery Barn) but that doesn’t really help decide what colors to go with. We also decided we’d go with a golf themed room. I started hunting for ideas and omg have you seen how ugly golf themed stuff is?!?! And kids room stuff? They have every sport under the sun except for golf!!! Seeing how “un-popular” it is made me only that much more determined to use it as a theme and make it awesome. In my hunting I found this picture of golf tees and have used it as my inspiration for the colors in his room. I’m going to use the green and tan on the walls and pull in some red and yellow in accents.

paint swatch for three of the walls

paint swatch for an accent wall

For the accent wall I plan on having specialty wall stickers designed into about 20 white golf balls in various sizes to cover the wall! Won’t that be cool? I think out of all the rooms I’m the most worried about Kye’s coming together only because so much of the design I have to create on my own!

5. Master Bedroom: I’m a PLANNER. I like to shop around for good deals and think, think, and rethink every choice I make. Well, time simply hasn’t allowed me to go at my own pace on this house building thing. Steve said we needed to pick house colors so I had to start buying up everything I wanted for the rooms that I needed inspiration for and Zach and I needed to pick a comforter in order to pick a bedroom color. We are using our white furniture from our old room and while I have LOVED the romantic feeling of our all gray and white room, it’s time for a change. We went with this bedding from Pottery Barn . I really feel like it’s a relaxed, romantic, beach type pattern and in person it’s even prettier because it’s kind of faded in a way that makes it look antique.

 I want to incorporate this blue as the accent color shown here as I think it’ll help tie in the blue in the rest of the house as well (but for now I only ordered the duvet cover and 2 matching shams!)

Here’s the paint swatch we went with – a green color

It’s Zach’s favorite room, it turned out GREAT!

I wanted to show off the curved wall edges too…isn’t that a neat touch?

6. Master Bath: Zach and I are young and haven’t been married long so we don’t have a lot of fancy artwork and stuff. Pretty much everything in our other house was stuff from Ikea and doesn’t really mean anything to either of us (hello garage sale!). All of Zach’s football stuff is important to him (and going in his office) and there is only really one picture that is special to us both. A family friend of my Dad’s named Bryce (who actually was killed a few years ago in a car wreck) drew this picture of my great Uncle Spear’s lot in Bowdoinham, Maine. My dad is from Maine and I have had MANY fun trips up there to visit. Zach and I actually got to spend some time at this lot and have such great memories of that trip. I LOVE this picture (showing an old out house on the land) and wanted to make sure it had a special place in our home. Why not have it in our bathroom where I can see it everyday (we will probably have the matting and framing changed out)?

When it came time to pick colors, Mom Kye and I ran up to Target and I literally just bought shower curtains right then and there. SO not me!!! But it was just fate I guess as this shower curtain looks great with the picture and really helped me to pick a color for our bathroom.

Here’s the swatch (matches the picture, curtain and our bedding!)

It looks awesome going from the green to this color!

7. Upstairs Bathroom: Eventually this bathroom will be used by the older children (Kye and Baby #2 once #3 and #4 come along) but for now it’ll be used by guests staying in the guest bedroom, by Zach coming from his office, and by Kye coming from the playroom. So again, my whole fun-yet-adult-look applied. Mom and I grabbed this shower curtain too and loved that it incorporated the exact color from the living areas.


this is kinda a foamy green color that matches one of the circles perfectly

I can’t wait for some lighting to come in so I can REALLY see how it looks!

8. Playroom: We debated about how to decorate what will be the temporary playroom until we finish the BIG playroom. We talked about it and decided that Kye does NOT need anywhere close to that big of a playroom right now, or anytime soon, and that even when baby #2 comes the two of them will be just fine in a regular room sized play area. So we went ahead and decided to make the room a legit playroom and decorate it like one then once Kye moves up to that room as his bedroom (when #3 comes along) we’ll repaint and have the big playroom finished. 

We spent a lot of money on Kye’s baby bedding and I hate to see it go to waste so I figured we (“we” meaning Zach’s grandma who can sew) can turn his bumper into a valance for the window and at least use the pillow in there if nothing else. So I used this pillow from his room as the color inspiration.


I really like the idea of a yellow room – so fun!

It’s really a lot brighter than I expected! I’m thinking we may wanna add a chalk board paint wall to help tone it down

9. Guestroom:  Zach and I used this bedspread in our first house together and then as a guest bedroom set in our most current home. We both really still like it (don’t you have it in your house too Katie Green? I thought I saw it in a picture!) and want to use it in the new house guest bedroom (until we have baby #4 then it will become baby #2s room!).

In our first home the colors of the walls were tan and in the second one they were blue…this time around I didn’t think the new house needed any more blue but I like that the duvet cover will pick up the blues used throughout the rest of the house. I went with a gray/tan color that will match perfectly. I think it’ll make for a really pretty guest bedroom!

turned out great!

10. Zach’s Office: The color of Zach’s office doesn’t really matter as I promise you the walls will be covered from floor to ceiling in all of his football stuff (framed jerseys, tropheys, footballs, etc). He wanted to go with red but I’ve read all about how red can create a hostile environment and the last thing we want is for Zach to be mad the whole time he’s working! Plus while VSU colors were red, his high school colors were maroon and that would clash sooo bad with red, ya know? I finally talked him into going with a silver gray color since both VSU and Lowndes use silver as an accent color on everything.

We’ll probably never see these walls this bare again!

11. Closets: I printed out a copy of the house plans and labeled all the rooms with what color went where and then I realized we never picked out a closet color. At first I thought we could just have them paint the closets to match the bedrooms but then what if we decide to change the room colors? Painting a closet would be a PAIN. So…the only area of our house that has any tan is the closets haha

The girls painting thought it was funny and said they have NEVER seen so many different colors in a house!

Picking out paint colors was pretty stressful as Zach and I have never had the luxury of having someone else paint for us and we wanted to make sure we REALLY liked the colors since we both hate painting and don’t want to do it again for awhile. I pretty much cleaned out Lowe’s paint swatches (I took each of my inspiration items with me and walked the aisle with each thing to decide what colors matched – it took me almost 3 hours) and felt guilty throwing them away so if anyone needs some paint colors let me know.

I’m really happy with how everything turned out so far – it all looks so much better in person so hopefully many of you can come see it once construction is finished! (Side story: Casey, Zach’s sister, was over looking at the house the other day and ran into a random neighbor who was checking it out and he said to her, “how many kids do they have?!?!” hahaha kinda funny to have this many rooms with only one kid!)

Kye’s even worn out from all the deciding

Emily Parker

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