When I originally started this blog about 7 years ago, we lived in an old house that I had actually grown up in from the time I was around 2 years old.  It was old in the sense that the actual building was old, but old also because that’s where I grew up.  So the blog name really summed up the basis of our lives together as a family – 3 Kids, 2 Dogs and 1 Old House.

Then we moved.

Everyone joked that we should totally change the name of our blog to 3 Kids, 2 Dogs and 1 New House.  The reality is that the house that we moved into was new to us, but still not a new house.  By any means.  I think if I had to hazard a guess I would say it was built in the mid sixties or seventies.  So basically the same as our old, old house.

The previous owner of the house had done a lot to it to bring it into the now – built in cupboards, opening up the kitchen and lounge area.  But the one thing that he got totally flipping wrong, was the colour of the paint on the walls.  The outside of our house was YELLOW!  And I love yellow.  But a yellow house with a bright red roof just reminded us of cartoon drawings kids do.  Not necessarily bad, but just totally NOT our style at all.  You can see it in the background of that picture up there.  It’s the only one I could find because I really hated it so much, I never took pictures of the house.

As soon as we could, we got rid of the yellow.

Here’s a picture of the same area but from further away…

One day I spent the entire day out in the sun thinking that I would get a smashing tan while I painted the house.  While doing this, I realised two important things…

• Sunblock is used for a reason (I was so burnt that I pealed TWICE)
• I would never be painting the house again on my own – what a flipping mission.  I gave up after doing just the front side.

And also, we painted the actual house brown instead of yellow.  Which at the time seemed like a good idea, but the moment the colour was up, we didn’t like it either.  Not hated it as much as the yellow, but it wasn’t really that much better.  The black walls we still adore, but not them brown ones that I had just spent a day of my life changing.

That was about 3 years ago.  And like most people in our position, we lived with it.  Because we didn’t have the money to change it.  Painting can be such an expensive process if you’re not actually sure of what you need, which colours you really want etc.

SO when Prominent Paints got in touch with us to do a little DIY project, I was like, “Cool, but how do you feel about painting our entire house?”.  They were keen to help us out with some of it and so armed with a voucher and all the Pinterest boards in the World, we headed to our local Prominent Paints store.

We stood and stared at the paint options for what felt like forever.  We knew we wanted white walls, but not that glaring white, and grey roof but not too dark.  We selected our colour choices and went to chat to the manager about putting in our order.  I’m so glad that we did because he was SO helpful in choosing the colours.  The ones that we had chosen had a slight purple tint which would have looked like crap after a while and the light grey that we had chosen for the roof would have gone so light in the sun over a few years that it wouldn’t actually what we wanted at all!

He also gave us some valuable tips on prepping the surface, how much paint to buy etc.  In total we used two big buckets of the roof paint in their standard dark grey colour and two big buckets of white with a slight (super slight) grey tint on the walls (which did all of the outside and also the inside of our garage that was STILL yellow!).

Seth and I were both genuinely impressed with their service and knowledge and I’m pretty sure that’s where we’ll be buying all the paint for any other projects we have from now on.  Even Wilfred, the awesome guy that comes to do the odd things in our home like painting, gardening etc said that he was so impressed with the paint and how easy it was to apply.

Again, I didn’t realise how long it would take to paint an entire house but Wilfred and his brother did such a fantastic job that it was all ready for the party that we had over the weekend!

Hooray!

Those were kind of taken in the dark because by the time that everyone left it was getting dark but I still think it looks SO much better than the red and yellow or red and brown.

We’ve still got SO many plans for this little old house and the play mansion so we’ll definitely be back to using Prominent Paints to help us create our vision.

Here’s a last little picture from this morning, as the sun was coming up.

And lastly I’ll leave you with these flashbacks – some more pictures I found of the yellow house but look how tiny my babies were!!!