Painting the Girl Cave Walls

When I first considered moving into the condo, back in January 2012, I convinced my husband to let me turn the 2nd bedroom into a GIRL CAVE.  Thankfully, he agreed 🙂  I mean, a girl has to have somewhere to hang her dragon stuff, her knife collection, her disco balls, and set up her art studio, right?  Here is a “before before” shot, courtesy of my father-in-law who thankfully took a lot of photos when Jim first bought the condo in late 2009:

I say “before before” because by the time I met Jim, 2.5 years later, you couldn’t see the floor [or bed] due to all the boxes and piles of randomly tossed crap everywhere.  There was also spare furniture stacked [literally] above my head.  The first time I opened the “mystery door”, I believe I yelled “HOLY SHIT!” and stood there with my mouth gaping open.  And then spent 10 minutes trying to coax Darwin out, who considered the room to be a cat-wonderland of epic proportions.  In my husband’s defense, he lost a ton of stuff 4 months after moving into the condo when a freak weather event turned the river outside the house into a class 5 rapids and flooded the basement with 4 feet of water.  So from that time forward, the 2nd bedroom became his storage locker.  Which I can understand.  I’m just very thankful it’s mine now!  All MINE!  cackle

It took almost a whole day to move everything to the basement, scrub the stains from the carpet [a few weeks later we made the decision to rip out the carpet and install hardwood flooring, which you can read about HERE], take down the damaged blinds leftover from the previous owner, wash crayon off the wall, step back & envision the potential.  I really wish I’d taken some pictures before moving everything to the basement…  Darwin was right – it was totally epic!

I probably should have painted the walls before moving all my stuff into the cave but I had no vision yet for how I wanted the room to look.  The hardwood floors were a huge improvement, and the disco ball always made pretty polka dots on the walls and ceiling.

After spending many hours in the cave over the following 18 months, I finally decided on a color scheme.  I picked Benjamin Moore Violet Mist for the walls, Benjamin Moore Amethyst Shadow for the built-in cabinet and small bookcase, and Benjamin Moore Galaxy for the ceiling:

In July 2013 I started taping off the wood trim, baseboards and ceiling in preparation for paint, and the following day I got the first wall painted with 2 coats of paint.  Violet Mist is a subtle greyish purple – it’s kind of hard to tell when you look at the following photos fast that there’s a difference, but the 2nd photo has the Violet Mist on the wall 🙂  You can also see our original ladder, before I bought the Little Giant.

A few days later I got the 2nd wall painted [I’m not the fastest DIY’er, but I get things done] and I was loving how it was turning out!  I now have all 4 walls painted, as well as the trim.

I painted the trim white [it was dingy white before, and I painted it a nice, crisp, semi-gloss white to match the trim in the rest of the condo].  I blew fairy dust [very fine glitter] into the trim before it dried, so in certain lights it has a bit of a sparkle.  It’s hard to get a decent photo of fairy dust but I did my best: