I finally painted our dining area. It’s not a large area, but it was the fussiest to paint. There are two different levels of ceiling, a stairway area that’s hard to reach safely, and a bunch of little fixtures I really didn’t want to remove from the walls. (I also painted the bottom half of the living room but that was a piece of cake by comparison.) But hours of careful taping and two coats of paint paid off in a lovely dark purple that changes intensity as the light changes throughout the day.

I’m glad I went with three separate shades of purple. Sometimes, when one room is in shadow and another one lighted up, they look almost the same, but then the light will change and they’ll look completely different from each other.

This last photo is all three colors at once. Amazingly, that really dark purple on the left bottom is the same paint as the kitchen walls on the right. If I want the kitchen to look that dark all the time I’ll have to get softer lighting in there.

While I was doing all this prettying up I decided to get rid of our old half-broken blinds and put up new curtains. I made the sheer purple ones myself. You’re not allowed to look at them closely because I’m not great at sewing and they’re not quite even, but half hidden behind the black ones they look very nice. They also change color with the light because the back of the fabric is darker than the front. By day the dark backing really shows up, and by night the light, shiny front is more visible.

Those are the last of the big changes for now, but I have a long list of small things to do. I need to paint the kitchen baseboards but I haven’t decided what color I want. I’m tempted to go with some sort of absinthe green, but rose would be nice, too. In the spring I’ll be painting the kitchen walls under the cabinets–a very small but very fussy job–and I’ll have to decide what that will be so the baseboards will make sense with it. The accent colors I have in my head are strikingly close to Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, especially the tea party, but my final choices will probably be a bit calmer than the cartoon. Probably. No promises.