Patient and Neat

In our California house we had mixed luck with wall murals. On one hand, I made this super great bunny cross stitch mural.

On the other hand, we eventually realized we needed to have a piece of furniture directly in front of it and that didn't make much sense visually, so we eventually painted over it. Sad face.

In this house, though, I wanted to try our hand at another mural. Knowing that neither of us is particularly artistic in the painting sense, I wanted something even we couldn't muck up. Enter the paint-by-numbers.

Have you ever done a paint-by-numbers painting? I tried one when I was a kid and pretty quickly got frustrated and quit. I mean, all those tiny little shapes to fill in with a tiny little brush?! Ugh. Not for me. However, I couldn't help admiring the plethora of paint-by-numbers murals showing up on Pinterest.

This one at Camp Wandawega is probably the best known.

This one by Strawberry Mohawk is my favorite, though.

I figured you don't need to be artistic to succeed at paint-by-numbers, you just have to be patient and neat. So we borrowed a projector from Eddy's office over Thanksgiving break and started tracing.

(Did I mention our living room is green now?! IT'S SO AWESOME!)

Actually, Eddy did 100% of the tracing. The job got easier as it got darker.

Then we had a wall covered in numbered pencil shapes.

Next day we went to Lowes and waited a whopping 2 1/2 hours for them to kindly mix 35 paint samples for us. They were really nice about it and they took a picture of the sample pile when they were done because we beat the previous record of 24 samples for one customer. That's right. We're record holders.

Nothing left to do now, but paint! Eddy painted the first blob.

Sometimes there were some painting distractions.

Here I am pointing at the very last blob that needed painting.

See that crazed look in my eyes? That's from working on this thing non-stop days, nights, and weekends for 2 1/2 weeks.

Here, let me see if I can get a better shot of how crazy this thing made me.

Yeah, that about sums it up.

It was all worth it, though.

Here's a neat gif I made of photos taken at the end of each painting day for at least the second half of the painting process.

Even the cat approves, and he is very discerning.