Hallway painting project. More of a "during" than an "after".

This project is from a couple of weeks back, but figure it's worthy of posting since I still seem to be finding bits of paint in my hair.

I finally used some of the Benjamin Moore paint I purchased the weekend after I closed on my house. The color is Abalone, from Benjamin Moore's Color Preview collection.  I first discovered it in one of House Beautiful's paint color articles (my favorite feature in this magazine). It was probably a bit reckless of me to buy two gallons of the rather spendy Aura paint without testing, but I felt confident about the decision after finding photos of it in action like this living room linked here.

Here are a couple of before shots. The first shows the scary attic hatch, which I painted with the same Hirshfield's ceiling white I used throughout the hall. Let's not use our imagination as to the source of some of those icky stains on the wall. The second is a view down my teeny, door-filled hall. It takes a left turn where you find a dark little nook with doors leading to the bathroom and a bedroom.

Abalone is an amazing light grey. When I put the first coat on, I saw a hint of pink and a luminosity that is very much like the shell of its namesake. Some people consider grey a cold color, but I feel this one is very different. It's going to be a great color for my living room, which connects directly to this little hall.

The paint formulation I used was Benjamin Moore Aura Matte. Some people have a fair amount of angst about this paint, but I found that l liked it a lot. I followed the direction I got from the fine folks at the paint shop and also took a quick look at this video that describes the best way to work with the paint.

The process I followed was to cut in and let all areas dry for at least an hour. Then I went through and worked with the roller. I'm not very good at doing the cutting in because I'm a bit too precious with the paint so a lot of work went into coat #2. I was also dealing with painting around five doorways in very tight quarters. Not much fun. Some people consider Aura a one coat paint. I disagree, but maybe that's because my uneven plaster walls make it pretty easy to miss a spot or two.

This isn't really an after shot, but it will have to do. It shows the contrast between the paint left by the previous owner and the Abalone. As you can see, the hall and living room morph together. I had better get cracking on painting the living room because I don't want to get too comfortable living with this chaos!

My disclosure statement covers all of my posts, but just to be clear, all products mentioned in this project were purchased by me.

Comments

[Leah @ Storybook Ranch]

that's a great color! Your home seems to be a bit like mine; the floor plan is set up so that once you paint one wall, you can't stop without painting the entire house :0

[Amy]

Thank you for commenting! I'm a big fan of your blog and I'm envious of a lot of the features your house has.

I like the partial archways in mine, but it is kind of weird how there aren't that many proper divisions between the rooms. Right now it looks pretty bad, so I guess I'd better get cracking on painting the living room. The problem is that I need to sort out the window hardware first. Fun, but spendy!