Albion Gould

makes & travels

Don’t Mow, Paint!

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You know how you always wish you had more time, or at least a few extra hours to work on the growing list of projects on your wish list? Scott and I only have the weekends together to work on house projects. On a normal Saturday morning, Scott heads out to mow our lawn. I’ll follow him to take care of the trim. We don’t have the biggest yard ever, but it’s enough that it takes precious time away from doing the fun stuff. Here in the Chicago suburbs, we’ve gone from thunderstorms to 90 degrees to tornado warnings and back again, which has made for a very unpleasant time doing yard work. I recently discovered TaskEasy, who not only took care of our yard needs, but gave us time to do the fun stuff.

TaskEasy is a great way to find reputable service providers without having to do the legwork yourself. Every provider is a licensed local contractor. The website is really easy to use (and you know that’s a big deal for me!) and you can easily get and approve a quote before you agree to the service. They offer services for lawn care, snow removal, and hanging holiday lights. The frequent communication and reminders also help scattered moms stay on top of things. My favorite part is that they bring up a google map of your property once you input your address and you outline the areas you want taken care of. And, when you mess up and outline the entire property instead of just the grass, they are incredibly polite and have already taken care of it before you sheepishly bring it up.

taskeasy map

corrected taskeasy map

Because we didn’t need to worry about yard maintenance, Scott and I started tackling some of the painting that has been on our list. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve seen that we’ve started a bunch of projects recently. I want to show you a fun little project that we did for our bedroom.

boring bedroom

Our house was built in 1988 and everything is oak. Everything. We want to paint the majority of the oak white.

painter's tape

We decided to test our skills on the divider between the bedroom and sitting area, where we have our desks. I’m going to ask you to please overlook the mess in these pictures, because we have everything going on at once. I will post clean room pictures when it’s all finished.

Anyway, Scott got to work taking care of the first bit of oak and I got to work on some color. I received this stencil from Royal Design Studio at SNAP this year and have been so antsy to use it. Scott agreed to a mustard color after we saw a color swatch that featured the purple and grey in the rest of our room with it.

stencil

The wall above the bed was bare, so I decided to use the stencil to make some artwork in the same color scheme to bring the room together. I used a set of canvases I had bought from Michael’s during a sale and paint from sample pots. Love me some paint samples! This is a very inexpensive and easy way to bring in whatever color and style you need.

canvas

I used the purple as my base color. (You paint over your bathroom sink, right?!)

purple

I used grey paint for the stencil color on the first canvas.

stencil

stencil

And yellow for the other two.

yellow

We have a long ways to go in the bedroom alone. Door and window frames, baseboards and doors all need painted white. I need to find the yellow and grey bedspread that is hiding in the basement. But, I’d say that we’re off to a great start, and I know that we’d still be only thinking about painting in here if it wasn’t for TaskEasy giving us a few extra hours.

artwork and wall

I can’t wait to show you how it all comes together. Soooon!

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About Albion

I’ve wanted to be an archaeologist, in theatre, a judge and to run a museum. I’m now in my mid-30s and have no idea what I want to be when I grow up.

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Comments

  10. [email protected]

    Oh, will they please come mow my 5 acres?? It seems that I am mowing every other day and not getting anything else done I have a question about your paint and stencil. Since you used paint sample I am assuming it is regular house paint. Did you add anything to the paint to make it a little thicker for the stencil? Yours came out so nice – what is your secret?
    [email protected] recently posted…Go Junkin’ In Garrison TexasMy Profile

    Reply

    • Albion

      It has been so nice to not need to worry about mowing! Yup, I used regular house paint samples. I kind of collect them. Give me all the pretty colors! I used them because it’s what I had on hand. The Pantone paint (the purple) worked great. The Glidden paint (the grey) was naturally a bit thicker than the Behr (the mustard) and went on a bit better. For all of them, I rolled most of the excess paint off using the tray before I painted the stencil, so the roller was pretty dry. Does that make sense?

      Reply

  19. laura londergan

    LOVE that radiant orchid color. I am getting ready for a master bedroom makeover & chose this color + steel grey + white. Great minds huh? Hopefully we both can get these rooms done before the end of summer. 😉

    Reply

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