What is clean, crisp and beautiful and making me oh-so-happy? My new entryway! And by “new,” I mean, I busted my butt for two weekends back-to-back to turn the entryway, staircase and upper landing at #thecozycottage from drab to fab as part of the One Room Challenge. Last week, I may have come off just a teeny weeny bit stressed. Well, I WAS! But this week is a different story. Why? Because white paint!

If you’re new to The 256 Project, my name is Régine and I, along with my dude Daniel, are making our first house (a 1903 cottage in the Dirty Jerze that I call #thecozycottage) a home through renovation, design and food. This is my first time taking part in the One Room Challenge and I’m making over the entryway, staircase and upstairs landing entirely through DIY. To read more about this project, please see ORC Week 1 here and ORC Week 2 here.

I was stressed AF last week because I took on my very first major DIY (adding beadboard to all three areas) using power saws and a pneumatic nail gun for just about the first time and it took much longer than I thought. I started feeling overwhelmed and like I was already very delayed and not sure if I would ever get back on track. Well, I took a day off from work last week and powered (literally) through the rest of the beadboard job and then painted everything over the course of three long days.

The beadboard work is not perfect, but I did it entirely by myself and it’s already making a difference visually (in mostly the good way, ha!), so I’m happy with this project so far. A lot of wood putty and then a whole lot of paint cures many ills.

So let’s talk paint, because paint is one of those universal cure-alls of which I have a love-hate relationship.

First of all, painting is great. It is probably the least expensive, most powerful design decision you can do to elevate or transform a room. The previous owner had the house painted entirely in Navajo White (which has got to be a racist name, no?) with white trim. Navajo White is a dingy beigy white that is unflattering anywhere. We had painted almost every room up to this point, so much painting in such a short amount of time that I real-life cried and internet-cried about it. Which is in part what took me so long to get to this part of my home. I was #overit.

So when it came time to work on the One Room Challenge, we knew we were going to paint and we thought about different paint ideas. But we pretty quickly settled on white for one specific reason: those stained glass windows. They cast such pretty pinks on the walls when the sun shines through them and we didn’t want to do anything that would take away from that. And, while we most definitely embrace color over at #thecozycottage, white paint can be just so perfect sometimes.

I went with Behr’s Powdered Snow. It was the first white paint we chose for the house (our living room) and it worked perfectly in there. While different rooms that can handle a white paint may need different types of white, we’ve used Powdered Snow in the mud room and the guest bedroom and it looks beautiful there too. It’s a creamy white with warm pink undertones but looks bright white in our house because of the natural light those rooms get. (Here’s some info on how to choose white paint.)

I chose Behr’s Ultra paint in a matte finish for the walls above the trim and ceiling. Painting the walls and ceiling was a beast because of the height and curves and corners, but with some ingenuity (duct taping a paint brush to the end of a roller extender, FTW), and some ladder usage, I got it done. And then I went with Behr’s Ultra paint in a satin finish for the beadboard and trim so it can be wiped up even more easily than the matte finish (although matte is supposed to be an easily cleanable flat). I liked the way the satin looked on the beadboard when painted with a brush versus a roller and it needed two coats so I PAINTED EVERYTHING WITH A NARROW BRUSH. Um…ouch. But I got it done.

It’s looking pretty good, right?

So now that we’re halfway done with the ORC (yikes, that just made me a tad more stressed), I thought it would be a good time to check in with the to-do list.

So that’s where I am at the halfway mark. What do you think so far? If you’re interested in more ORC, check out the 20 featured designers here and my fellow guest participants here. If you aren’t already, follow me on Instagram because I’m posting updates in real time to Stories and have created an ORC highlight.