I suppose that one of my favorite things about redoing an old house is the wide variety of how things get accomplished. (For the back story on the house, see here).

This last Saturday we had a "Painting Party", where my husband fixes up a bunch of reasonably nice food (which in our world seems to mean lots of meat), and we invite everyone we know to come join the fun (and by fun, we mean hard work). We generally have 15-40 people show up to "join in the fun". This time we had 25-30, plus the seven of us.

We worked for about 8 hours (people came and went through out the day - only my hubby was there for all of it), and managed to prime or paint (sometimes both) everything but two of the three bathrooms in the house (one we needed to keep functional, while in the other we stored all the stuff that couldn't be in the rooms getting painted).

It won't surprise you that we're overly frugal with paint, so instead of buying the shades we wanted, we bought lots and lots of mistints, and my "can do everything" husband custom mixed shades to my request. The main floor is a sedate gray, the upper story is a light greyed-out blue-green that I've dubbed "russian sage" after the plant. There's a bright orange room (why he bought that mistint, I must admit I wonder, but it'll be canning and freezer storage, so much of the wall won't be seen), and about half of the lowest level (a walk-out basement) is in murals.

Here's the pictures, which are posting in a rather random order:
#1 a tree, painted in the hallway leading to the kids wing
#2 a city-scape painted on the edge of the laundry room (and a planet from the solar system painting which is around the corner)
#3 the city-scape in process
#4 flowers on my older daughter's wall
#5 a cousin, painting a tree outside the basement bathroom
#6 beware of little boys with green rollers!
#7 the solar system on my middle-son's bedroom wall
#8 the tree in progress
#9 The sedate gray of the living room. This also shows the trim woodwork my husband is installing to reinstate some age and character into the house.
#10 Another shot of the living room gray and trim work.
#11 flowers and butterflies painted by my sister and younger daughter
#12 my older daughter, singing as she paints a mountainscape. The blue tape line is the level that her loft bed will be, so she'll see the mountains when she's in bed.
#13 Walls weren't the only thing painted.
#14 The closet in the library is red. It dried darker and bluer - almost somewhere between dark red and dark purple.
#15 Is the painting of the very tall stairwell. I helped with that until it got to precarious for me. My hubby got to finish it up on a very tall ladder. The color going on is the "russian sage"
#16 the pantry. We've dubbed it the "sun room". Not because there's any windows, but because it hurts your eyes to look at it.
#17 My office - "Russian sage" walls and the pale maple floor. There will be white trim added. I'm loving the combination.

I just realized that I didn't get a picture at all of the biggest mural - a woodsy mountain scene that has rivers flowing down the mountains to a lake. And one of my kids (oldest boy) opted for a completely solid green wall. That's also not pictured - it's the color of the roller in #6.