High Contrast Paint For A Craft Room

Sometimes I take a painting risk and it goes bad.  Oh so bad.  Like the time that I thought it was a good idea to paint our old bathroom bright yellow.  Like BRIGHT yellow combined with a black vanity.  Glad I tried it but even more glad I painted over it.  And there’s the time a few weeks ago that I decided to paint the craft room a dark, almost black, green.  Which ended up good.  Oh so good!  The room is far from complete but here’s a sneak peak.

On the “most important projects to tackle” list, working on the craft room wasn’t high up on it.  At the time, we were staring down the barrel of a gun Thanksgiving and hosting 35 members of Colby’s family.  Needless to say, working on our kitchen may have been the smarter choice.  But sometimes you just want a craft space come Christmas season to set up your very own wrapping station.  Wrapping station won.

The room is tiny, super tiny at only 10′ x 8′ making it the perfect size to set up shop for crafting.  A space for Angie vs. Sewing Machine throw-downs.  Here’s what the room looked like when we first moved into the house:

And then what it looked like when I decided to tackle the space:

You know how when you move into a new home and you have THAT room?  The room where everything goes that doesn’t have a home?  A room where you can just shut the door and ignore the mess behind it?  Note…that’s what I did when taking pictures of our hallway/landing makeover project:

Well, the craft room was that space for us.  We spent some time sorting through the pile, putting things where they belong, and donating items we no longer need or want.  Thanks to a big, empty walk-up attic, we also set up some metal shelves there which I use for home decor storage.  I love it!  All my random accessories live up there.  Every candle stick, frame, vase, and rogue tchotchke.  So every time I get a wild hair and want to switch up accessories (or add accessories to a freshly redone space) I just waltz up to the attic and shop what I already have, many pieces I picked up this summer at the thrift store.

But back to painting.  I spent a little time mulling over color choices.  I had two schools of thought for the room.  Light or dark.  It kind of reminded me of when Colby and I went to visit his sister in New York City and we went to the oldest bar in town.  The only two beer choices were…wait for it…light or dark.  In the end, dark won.  Particularly, River Rock by Benjamin Moore.

It’s a deep shade of green that almost looks black.  I fell in love with it on the swatch, googled it a bit, and decided to just go for it without testing it out first.  I’m not much of a paint color tester, I just go for it.  Usually, when I go for it, I slightly panic when I do the cutting in, but not this time.  It was love at first swipe.  See what I did there.

Let’s go back to the white vs. dark contemplation.  I was leaning white.  I’m in this phase where I want to paint our entire house white.  Thankfully for Colby, who isn’t a fan of the whole house white idea, it is just a phase and happens to be the color I choose when I don’t know what to pick.  But for the craft room, I stood across the hall from the room and visualized it painted white.  I’ve been reading Emily Henderson’s book Styled while I was color visualizing and one of her statements just clicked with me.  If you’re a color lover, paint your walls white.  It lets your accessories shine.  But if you own a lot of neutral, paint your walls a color so your accessories pop.  Well, I own a lot of neutrals.  Dark it is.

The pic above is another reason why I chose dark.  The dark walls of the craft room draw your eye back to the room and tie into the black in the Salty Pete art and the Vittsjo shelves.  Visualizing the space white, it just wouldn’t have had the same effect and the space (in my mind) looks a bit cluttered without a dark color to anchor the room.

No sooner had I painted the craft room walls, than Colby was up there putting together a craft table that he built for me out of scrap wood from the property.  There are fence posts, old wood that was stored in the library, and old shelving wood from the parlor.  That man is amazing!  I show him an inspirational picture, give him an hour, and he returns with an amazing build.

I still have some organizing and decorating work to do in here, a light fixture project (note the old ugly light fixture full of flies conveniently cropped out of the progress photos), and a wrapping paper storage build to go but this just may be my new favorite space in the house.  And I’ve already logged some serious hours in here wrapping and crafting away.