Mission Accomplished!

I have a little secret...look closely at the pics I posted of the mantel last week and perhaps you will see my little secret. 

Or let me help you...here is an uncropped photo of the mantel.

The whole room had that terrible palm tree border. I always tried to crop it out when I posted pics of the room because I disliked it so much. Here is a better view of the room with the border...

Yep, see the palm tree border?

Well I have wanted to take it down since we moved in but I was worried about what was underneath. If it had been painted before the border was put up, I figured taking down the border would be quick and easy but if it had never beed painted that would be another story. My suspicion was that it had never been painted...I assumed the former home owners were to lazy to paint around the top of the room so they just put up a border. Turns out, I was right... 

 The border came down super easy (it look less then 20minutes) but like I suspected, there was not paint underneath. There were roller marks where the former home owner rolled the paint up high enough to be covered by the border but left a 3-4 inch uneven white gap. I was able to find the paint in the basementh but I worried that it would not match since I had no idea how long the paint had been sitting in the basement. Turns out,  the paint matched almost perfectly.

A couple of hours of painting and this is what it was looking like...

Nice! I instantly asked myself why I waited a year to take the border down! 

The other reason I never took it down was I was worried about this area...

 Above the exterior door in the family room, it is two differnt colors. Above the border it was white (which is really the dining room wall) and below it was beige. I didn't really want to paint above the border to match the beige below because then I would have to paint all the other sections of the dining room to match. I didn't know how it would look when I took down the border, but my original plan was to put a piece of trim molding up to break up the colors. But when I was painting with the beige, I painted a straight line and it turns out it looked pretty good so I don't think it needs the molding.

Mission accomplised! Finally after living here for a year, the palm trees are gone! YAY!