Our Fireplace Project

For some reason, our unit is one of the few in the building in which the developer did not put lights in the living room. I needed a quick fix for lightening up our fireplace wall until we can afford to wire the ceiling for lights. We decided that paint was the most affordable, dramatic option.

I'm not a big fan of our corner fireplace wall. The tile is so dark and the nook is awkward. In an ideal world, I'd hang some cool pendant lights there to fill the space and provide some light.

I chose to paint the wall green to play off of our couch, which sits across the room. Andy and I agreed on the color "Leapfrog" by Behr, which seemed to be just a smidge brighter than the couch.

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Oh man! HUGE MISTAKE. It was bright. I mean, like Kermit-the-Frog-dipped-in-acid-and-then-plugged-in bright.

While I do not typically shy away from bright colors, it was just too much. Not to mention that it didn't align with the rest of our house. I went to Home Depot with a swatch of our couch fabric to see if they could color match it. As I stood in line, I realized that our swatch perfectly matched the next color on the Behr card, Wild Grass.

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I wasn't wild about the color, so I had it mixed with only 45% of the color and it turned out perfect. A week later (I think that I got some bad paint because it was thick like batter and took days to dry.), the wall was finished!

Here's the final product:

The candles are the "luminere" line from CB2. I originally tried them without the side photos, but it was too bare. I love the way that they look with the green paint.

They look great when lit up at night - even if my photography skills don't show it.