BEFORE & DURING. I forgot to take a photos of the window before I painted, but you can just see it in the first photo, BLUE! All the skirting & frames were blue! The wardrobe doors had never been painted so were very dirty & stained and the wall colour that I actually thought was a dirty yellow seemed more beige once I painted over it with my lovely pale yellow. It has brightened the room up so much. The only thing I haven't done is the blue door. In my other daughters room (which is mirror image of this room) all four doors were painted blue!! It was a really big job to cover that blue. And so with this room I decided instead I will swap it for another door in house that will be getting taken out when we renovate. :-)

A few people have asked for the colours I used on my house. I used the Resene colour range. *Weather boards - Ash *Battens - Triple Ash *Trims, window frames and vertical rails on stairs and deck- Alabaster *Top Hand rails and accents (pretty much anything that was red) - Half Nocturnal *Stair treads - Alabaster in centre, Ash on sides *Stringers on stairs - Ash Hope this helps :)

I can see you have already had some great advice and if I offered my choice from the three it would be the middle one. But in truth, I personally wouldn’t have any of them as they just remind me of those ‘real fake’ pictures where a group Thai ‘artists’ each paint a part and pass it on, banging out 100 a day. I am pleased that some Thai family is in employment, just not sure about all the middlemen. For our wedding my wife and I asked all guest to donate whatever they felt they wanted toward a painting, we already had enough kettles. In the end we had enough to buy a painting each. I originally wanted to buy a picture that may go up in value and be something of an investment for my son. The gallery owner who helped us with our choice made this point, that when you choose something for an investment its worth remembering you should enjoy looking at the picture as well. We went with that advice first. I’m sure there must plenty of places where a genuine local artist would appreciate the purchase of their work in order to make a living. My plan when we finish our rebuild here in Christchurch is to fill our walls this way. But if you ended up with an abstract those links on doing one yourself looked interesting.

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