a suntan without the damaging effects of the sun...and no, i'm not talking about sunless tanners here people

So, I was reminded again this past holiday weekend that my husband and I RARELY go out of town on holiday weekends. I'm not sure if it's because both our families live in town, so we don't use holiday weekends to travel to visit them, or if we just don't think ahead and make plans to go out of town. Whatever the reason, we found ourselves at home again this past weekend. Since all of our friends were out of town, we decided to make good use of our time and paint our dining room. We've been contemplating this job for at least a month, but have not been able to proceed because of the textured ceiling. It's a popcorn texture complete with glitter specks that John absolutely despises (I actually didn't mind them much because that's the kind of ceilings I grew up with). Well, last weekend, John, his dad, and his brother scraped the popcorn texture off, so we had no excuses not to paint this weekend.

I've been considering the color scheme for about two months; I found the idea in the premier issue of this magazine and ever since have been trying to decide if it could work in our dining room. Prepare yourself...it's pretty different. The horizontal shot (complete with fuzzy Margot):

And the vertical shot, so you can get a better look at the pink ceiling.

No, you don't need adjust the color on your screen...the ceiling is pink, above the chair rail is orange and below the chair rail is a light gray. We're not quite sure what we think. It's definitely pretty close to the photo in the magazine, but we think the orange is too bright...too bold...to orange. We bought 2 other test oranges before committing to this one (because we were pretty sure and didn't want to buy ANOTHER tester). The first orange (Osage Orange) was too bright/intense...it looked like a highlighter. The second orange (Kumquat) looked like a pale, rusty brown on the swatch, but was also a bright orange on the wall. We thought a darker orange (Marquis Orange) might tone down the brightness. I think we were wrong. We ended up with a bright, BOLD orange. Honestly, we don't have the energy to even think about repainting it now being that we spent two entire days priming, taping, painting trim and walls -- all while trying to keep Margot out of the room. We're going to see how we feel about it in a week or two. In the meantime, if you want to appear as if you have a great tan (or sunburn, depending on how you look at it), come over to our house for dinner.

Side note: We forgot to take a before photo, but for those of you who want to envision where we came from, picture brown trim, cream above the chair rail and red wallpaper with pineapples below the chair rail. Definitely not our style.