from steaming jungles of lustria, to a big blueberry, to a golden grove.

When Ben and I first moved in to this place we call home, just 3 weeks after we got married, we were super thankful for such a fantastic townhouse. We did, however, move into this extra wonderful home right after two sets of boy roommates had just called this very place their home. Needless to say, there was some cleaning that needed to be done... and some painting that needed to be done. Our dining room was the first place, in my opinion, that needed some immediate help. There was a map drawn on to the wall. A well done map, I must say, but a map nonetheless, which was totally fictitious and yet had a striking resemblance to the actual map of the world. For some, it was hard to watch as we painted over this masterpiece. It's not that I didn't respect this art-- but with "countries" named things like the Steaming Jungles of Lustria and Nippon, it just made it difficult to eat dinner in that room. Seriously, I did not make those names up (but someone did...).

We chose this great bold blue to cover the map as well as the other walls in the dining room. If you know anything about me, you probably know that I paint, and repaint, maybe more than most people. I love repainting rooms- it really changes the whole feel of the room, and sometimes I get tried of the original feel I created with one color and have the desire to change the feel completely. I love color so much too, and its hard to pick one perfect color from the wall of paint chips the stores put before you. So, I usually pick one and then get tired of it in a year or two (or in some cases a day).

It all started when I was pretty young, my aunt let me paint my room a bright blue and then when I lived at home in college she let me move rooms and paint that one the color of a purple grape. Isn't she great? Anyway, she allowed me, from a young age to express my love of paint colors and now its just on a bigger scale- I have my entire house as a canvas! I have repainted our living room twice, our foyer once, our bedroom 3 times, our bathroom twice, the office just once, the kitchen once... And, as you probably guessed, I got tired of that blue. And now I have repainted the dining room twice. Ben is so gracious to have helped me with most of these projects. Sometimes, he just comes home and a wall is a totally different color. Together we spent a good part of our week trying to cover the blueberry of a room with about three coats of paint. Ben swears we are losing square footage in our house because of my "hobby".

I had a vision of golden pear happiness in my dining room and... so it is. Golden groves on two walls and white on the other two, to make the room feel a little bigger (and because we found a $5 gallon of "oops!" paint in white). Here it is- the finished product! for now...