Benjamin Moore Aura® Waterborne Interior Paint

We were pretty lucky that when we moved into our house, we didn’t need to do a lot of painting.  Most of the rooms were painted pretty well with decent colors.  We painted one bathroom before we moved in because it was an awful seafoam, but everything else was fine to stay for a bit.  One could argue that we needed to paint this bedroom, but it’s so funny and we aren’t using it, so we aren’t going to bother.

Our reasoning behind keeping this atrociousness is that it’s our 3rd spare room and we won’t be using it until/if we have two children.  The first child will be in the nursery until we have a second child.  If it’s a boy he can move into the Ohio State room.  If it’s a girl, we’ll redo the pink horse room to make it a little less pink and a little less horsey.  If we end up having two girls or two boys, they’ll share a room until they are older anyway.  That’s relatively unlikely because my family only has 1 sex of children within immediate families.  Seriously, my parents have 6 girls, Amber has 2 girls, Julie has 2 girls, and Christine has 3 boys.  If we are following patterns within the sisters, it would appear that Jackie would have girls, Summer will have girls, and I’ll have boys, which I’ve pretty much always expected once I’d knew I’d be having kids with Lo.  Back to painting…

The other room that we knew we’d need to get to eventually was the finished basement.  It was yellow, and while it wasn’t a terrible yellow, Lo needed to make some wall repairs and we knew we’d need to paint it before we started using it as a “real” room.  So far we’ve just been sticking stuff down there as storage, but eventually we’ll be using it as a rec/tv/bar room hopefully.  Since Lo made his repairs and prepped the walls for paint and we decided this room would be our next project since I was accepted into the Benjamin Moore Aura^® Waterborne Interior Paint BzzCampaign.  With the campaign, I got a coupon for a free gallon of paint, a small can of white paint for testing (which we are going to use on the dirty white table in the pics below), a color fan to help me choose a color, and coupons to share.

Here is the basement before:

After consulting with some friends and family about possible colors, we finally settled on Benjamin Moore Lucerine, a medium-dark blue, which I found in color trends photo on the Benjamin Moore Website.  We figured it would make it warm and cozy and would work well with grays. We picked up a sample bottle, smeared in on the wall with my fingers, and declared it good.  Benjamin Moore Aura® Waterborne Interior Paint is expensive, but when you consider that it’s so high-end and should provide better coverage, it seems worth it.  Add to the fact that its low odor and low VOCs (and we can’t open windows), mildew resistant (great for the basement), has superior washability, thanks to Color Lock^® technology (great for kids), and is a paint and primer together (great for coverage), it seemed like a no-brainer.

We invited the Paint Club to help, which consists of Lo’s mom, gma, and sister – who for some reason actually like to paint and are good at it.  Lo painted the ceiling earlier in the week, knowing they’d be able to fix any mistakes on the walls because we are pretty terrible at painting.  When we painted the bathroom when we moved in, we had to repaint the ceiling because we were so bad at taping it off and edging.  From what I’d been told, the Paint Club would be excellent at edging.

They showed up on Saturday morning with supplies and our niece Sadie, and after they met Boof for the first time and we caught up with each other, we got to work.  After taping the baseboards off, my mother-in-law Kim, and gma-in-law Meem, got to work at edging…the entire room…all day long.  They are saints!

Misty and I did most of the rolling, and Lo helped roll when he wasn’t making 2 trips to the store for more paint (whoops!) or making tacos for lunch.  The second trip to the store was unexpected because the gray that we were using wasn’t the Benjamin Moore Aura^® Waterborne Interior Paint, so it didn’t cover as well OR cover as much sq. footage as the blue Benjamin Moore Aura^® Waterborne Interior Paint.  He bought the gray paint in just one step down from the Aura paint hoping to save money, but it would have probably been cheaper to use the Aura and not need a second gallon.  There was such an obvious difference at how good the Aura Paint rolled on versus the other paint we used, which was just one step down from the Aura.  I had to constantly dip my paint roller in the gray paint, whereas I could paint longer with each roller of Aura paint.  We are sold for our future projects.  Here are some after photos, including one of the paint club.

Blue walls with gray column and soffit (an accent wall behind)

Lucerine meets Timber Wolf:

Timber Wolf wall towards the stairs:

It was even low-odor enough for Sadie to help for a minute:

As awful as I find painting, it was actually a really fun day since it was with family!  It would have taken Lo and I weeks to get this done, so we are forever grateful to the Paint Club – and for getting to try the free gallon of Benjamin Moore Aura^® Waterborne Interior Paint from BzzAgent and Benjamin Moore