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randita_gw

Please help me lighten up this room.

randita
15 years ago

I am redoing my family room/den. It's a smallish room which is chopped up with 3 doors, 2 open doorways and a double doored laundry closet at one long end. Besides that, one wall has a large bricked fireplace - floor to ceiling. When we moved here 25 years ago, the doors needed replacing and DH wanted dark stained doors and woodwork and foolishly, I acquiesced. The room already had dark paneling up to chair rail height. In addition, there is no direct sunlight because there is a porch roof above the windows. It's a dark, chopped up looking room, to say the least.

You can imagine what a struggle it's been to decorate such a mess. Many years ago, I just painted the walls above the paneling off white and have lived with it.

We are fixing the house up to sell and realtor says we need to lighten up a lot. DH finally agreed to let me paint all the dark stained doors and trim white which will really help. I'm wondering about painting the dark paneling as well (but don't want it white because it's too formal for this room).

Here's my possible plan: Paint all doors and woodwork white, paint walls above the paneling SW Believable Buff flat, paint the paneling Believable Buff (semi-gloss). I don't think I want to go two toned (wall lighter (Believable Buff), paneling darker (Whole Wheat or similar) because I'm looking to do anything possible to avoid a chopped up look).

How does that sound? Also don't know whether I should paint the baseboard trim to match the paneling color or paint it white like the doors and door frames. Would that white strip along the floor chop things up more than just painting that baseboard trim to match the beige of the paneling or would the white strip look crisp and clean?

I hope you can visualize what I'm talking about. I have just started to paint the door trim white and have one door painted white, but the others are still dark stained so a photo at this point won't give a good idea of what the next step would be.

Thanks for the input.

As things progress, I'll try to post a photo.

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