Out of the navy, into the swimming pool

If you have the May 2011 issue of Country Living magazine, you may have seen this photo in the antiques appraisal article:

I've been kind of obsessed with it--I love the combination of the aqua walls and the red, and I love the bold graphic quality of the doily stretcher and the ticking stripe pillows. I've just kept thinking about the photo and how much I loved it and how I wanted that same feeling in my own house, but I didn't think I could get it because I don't have any aqua walls.

And then it hit me--duh, I can make aqua walls! My family room is connected on one long wall with my kitchen. Last year we repainted that portion of the walls and the kitchen in good-old Sherwin-Williams Rice Grain.

The other two walls of the family room are painted navy blue.

Here's The Mister painting in his sexy short shorts. ;) We painted the navy walls right after we moved into this house in 2004, before we even had any furniture. I was shocked that it was so easy to convince him to paint the walls such a dark, bold color--he's usually pretty conservative on those types of things.

Here's how our living room looked yesterday.

Nice that I cleaned up to take this photo, right? I don't dislike the navy, but once I got a bee in my bonnet about painting the walls aqua like that Country Living photo, that was it for me. I went immediately to Sherwin-Williams and picked out this gorgeous color

which is appropriately named "Swimming" and today I got started painting.

The Mister is out of town this week so I'm on my own for this project. Oh sure, I could wait until next week when I have his help and could probably get it done in half the time, but I want it done NOW so I'm willing to go it alone. I'm pretty sure The Mister is thrilled that he gets out of painting! Today I had two hours to paint during the time that Maren is at school and Porter naps.

I knew I wouldn't get very far and unfortunately, I was right. If you look at the photo of my room, I painted the short wall with the HOME letters and the tiny hallway right next to it. That was maybe 1/3 of the total area, and it took me two solid hours! Sheesh. I did have to do a lot of tricky cutting in, because that little "hallway" has two doors right next to one another at a right angle, and painting the tiny sliver of wall between the door frames is challenging. The rest of the wall from here on out is nice and flat so it should go much faster.

Once again, my proclivity for underestimating the amount of paint needed for a room has shown itself. I knew that going over a dark paint with a much lighter shade would require some kind of priming. I bought the Sherwin-Williams Super Paint that's supposed to be self-priming, although the salesman told me I'd need two coats because of how dark the navy is. He was right, it will. And although I've only done 1/3 of the area, I've used nearly 1/2 the paint, and then I still need to do that second coat.

The Super Paint is regularly priced at $43/gallon and I specifically bought it last week because it was 25% off. I'll be darned if I'm going to go fork over another 45 bucks (sale is over, of course) so I think tomorrow I'll make a visit to Home Depot or Lowe's and see if they can match the color in Behr or Valspar. I'll get as far as I can with the remaining S-W paint, and then use the new gallon as the top coat so it will all match. I do really love how the new aqua color is looking and I can't wait to see the final result!

Any advice on Behr vs. Valspar?