As shown in the bonus photos and bonus-video we posted earlier this week, week 25 of the project brought a significant change: the installation of drywall throughout the second floor and in major sections of the first floor. The drywall radically changes the feel of the house, as individual rooms are now closed off from one another, whereas before you could see from one end of the house to the other by looking through the wall joists.

The installation of the drywall also served to highlight the look of the recessed lighting in all of the new construction. I like the clean, modern feeling the new lights provide, but Julie isn’t a fan. We’ll continue to have lamps in some of the public spaces to add visual interest and atmosphere, but it will be nice to be able to turn the built-in lights up when the situation calls for a bright, evenly lit space.

While the drywall work was underway, we spent some time working with our designer, Lesley, to pick out paint colors for the public areas of the house. For the living room, stairwell, hallway, and great room, we’re going with a relatively neutral color called—and I am not making this up—Mawmaw’s Pearls. By choosing a single color for these areas, we’re hoping to provide a sense of continuity as you move throughout the house, and to let the brighter accent colors we’ve selected stand out.

For the kitchen cabinets, we’ve chosen two different colors. The upper and lower cabinets along the wall will be Swiss Coffee, and the island will be Sea Pine, which will complement the tile we’ve selected for the backsplash. We contemplated doing all the lower cabinets in Sea Pine, but ultimately thought that might be too much.

The laundry room will be yellow, calling back to our old living room color, with gray cabinets, and the upstairs bathrooms will reuse the Mawmaw’s Pearls color from the hallway, with brightly colored tile in the tub and shower areas to liven things up.

The kids are choosing the colors for their own rooms. Julia is going with a green named Goddess of Dawn, and William has asked for a “Star Wars room”, so he’ll be getting a shade of blue that will go well with Star-Wars-themed decor. Joe hasn’t decided what he wants to do yet: one possibility is for us try to recreate the bright colors he had in his old room, but we’d like to give him the opportunity to shake things up or shift them around if he’d like.

We also still have to figure out what we’re going to do in the master bedroom. Now that our old green carpet is gone, Julie is agitating to move in a different direction, but we need to sit down to hash that out. That should be an interesting conversation.

Gallery: Week 25: Drywall