And So It Begins: First Purchase For Our New House

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It has started. We made our first of many, many, many purchases for our new house this weekend! Ace Hardware was having a sale where everything you could fit into a paper grocery bag was 20% off, and we just had to take advantage of it.

I don't know how we did it, but we managed to fit all of this into just one bag!

$110.37 worth of painting supplies, and the most exciting part, paint samples! Since we've never lived somewhere we could paint before, this was a good opportunity to stock up on some basics like a drop cloth, trim shield, frog tape, paint brushes and rollers. I referenced this painting supplies check list from Martha Stewart, and this will be a good start for when we close on our house in 2 weeks.

Yes, you read that right, I'm planning to paint sample colors on the walls as soon as we get our keys!

Standing in front of the wall of paint chips at Ace, my husband's eyes started to glaze over...apparently he doesn't have the ability to visualize how any of the colors we were looking at were going to look on the wall. And taping the paint chips to the wall wasn't going to do it for him either. So we purchased samples of my three favorite Benjamin Moore paint colors: Labrador Blue for the family room, Blue Springs for the living room (it's actually a light grey, with soft blue undertones), and Shaker Gray for the dining room (a darker shade of grey that compliments Blue Springs). The two greys I'd liked from just looking at colors online, Moonshine and Storm Cloud Gray, I really didn't like once I saw the paint chips, since they had more of a yellow undertone. The ones we picked go much better with the blue we got for the family room.

Which just goes to show that you really need to go pick up those paint chips, looking on your computer monitor will only get you so far! And hopefully we'll end up liking these three colors we got samples of, after we get them up on the walls and see them in different lighting--otherwise it will be back to the store for more samples. I just didn't want to spend the money now on more samples, until we know if the ones we got don't work for us.

Hailey is also excited to start painting. She calls dibs on the rollers!

In other home-related news, we went to our first home show on Sunday. It was held at the Raleigh Convention Center, and was a lot of fun, if not that useful to us quite yet.

There were tons of vendors, from landscapers, to interior designers, to windows and siding installers. We just liked looking around at all of the possibilities, just because we could now that we (almost) own a home.

It was neat to get to pet feel the texture of the sod we plan to put in our backyard in a few years, see demonstrations on gutter guards, look at patio designs and fire pits, drool over huge hot tubs, and even see some cooking demonstrations. There were also lots of drawings to enter, which reminded me of bridal shows. Of course, I used an alternate email address, just like I did while wedding planning, to avoid the spam that comes along with entering the drawings.

Probably next year this show will be even more useful to us, once we have a more solid list of everything that needs to be done to the house, other than EVERYTHING, which is what it seems like we need to do right now, having not actually lived in the house yet. For now, I'll just be happy to get to paint the walls (and doors, and trim, and crown moulding, and baseboards, and...pretty much every surface in the house!), and we can worry about sod and gutter guards a little later.

Does anyone else get excited about paint chips or actually bringing home paint samples? Did you get giddy when you made your very first purchase of something for your first home? Even if it was just something small, like home improvement supplies? And who's been to a home show before? Did you find a lot of it useful, or did you go more to just look at the possibilities for the future?