An older house in East Nashville, a few minutes from downtown, redone inside from the ceilings down. Every room got a custom repaint, and most of them got new trim, panelling or built-ins as well. Tap any photo to see it full size.
The owners wanted the inside of the house rethought, not freshened up. So that is what we did. New cabinets in the kitchen. Trim and beadboard run through the dining room. Panelling halfway up the wall in the living room, then again in the bathroom. Built-in closets in the main bedroom. We tore out the old ceiling along with a couple of small closets and hung a new drywall ceiling in their place. And every room in the house got a custom repaint.
It is still the biggest job we have taken on. It is also a good example of something people do not expect going in: the paint is what ties a remodel together. New trim and new cabinets look like patchwork until the color goes on. After that they look like they were always there.
Here is how it came out, room by room.
This is the room people ask about, and the interesting part is that almost none of it is paint. It is trim. Beadboard from the floor up, casing around every window and the back door, and the exposed beams overhead, all laid out and cut to this specific room. No color you can roll onto a flat wall gets you the same thing.
Then all of it went white. The same white on the walls, the beadboard, the casing and the beams, so the room reads as one surface and the texture does the work. Beadboard is slow to paint well. Every groove has to be brushed out or the paint pools and runs, and rough-sawn beams drink the first coat. It is the kind of detail that looks effortless when it is right and cheap when it is rushed.
The living room got panelled wainscoting halfway up the wall, and then one decision that makes the room. The panels, the front door, the window casings and the long cabinet run under the butcher block top all carry the same blue-gray. Everything above the chair rail is white.
Keeping the trim the same color as the panelling is what stops it looking busy. Paint the panels one color and the casing another and you get a room full of outlines. Run one color through all of it and the lower half of the room reads as a single piece of millwork, with the white above making the ceiling feel higher than it is.
New white cabinets with brass hardware, set against dark counters and a tile backsplash. The walls, ceiling and trim went white to match, and in a galley kitchen this size that is less about taste than about light. There is one window, over the sink. A darker wall color would have turned the room into a hallway.
If you like the look and your cabinets are still solid, you may not need new ones. We paint and refinish existing cabinets too, and the cabinets page walks through both routes.
The main bedroom is the boldest room in the house. It is color drenched: walls, ceiling, crown, window casing and the new built-ins are all one sage green. The built-ins are ours as well, two tall wardrobes and a run of open shelving around the window, with a bench seat underneath it.
Drenching sounds like a lot on paper. In a room like this it does the opposite of what people fear. There are no white edges for your eye to catch on, so the corners fall away and the room feels calmer and a little bigger. It also hides the fact that old houses are never quite square.
The second bedroom went the other way. Soft white walls and ceiling, crown molding, nothing else going on. After the green, it is a rest for the eye.
The bathroom repeats the living room idea at a smaller scale. Beadboard halfway up the wall with a chair rail cap, painted a deeper blue, and patterned wallpaper above. The blue picks up the print in the paper, so the two read as a pair instead of two separate decisions.
Paint in a bathroom has a harder life than anywhere else in the house. Steam, splashes, wet towels, a wipe-down every week. So the panelling gets a tougher finish than a bedroom wall would, one that can be scrubbed without going chalky.
On a job like this the order matters as much as the work. The old ceiling came out and the new drywall went up first. Then the trim, panelling, built-ins and cabinets. Paint went on last, over everything, so there was never a fresh wall getting dinged by a cabinet install or a finished coat getting cut into by a carpenter.
When those trades are three different companies, somebody is always waiting and somebody is always touching up. Doing it with one crew is the main reason this house came out as clean as it did.
We paint and remodel in East Nashville and across the rest of Davidson County out of our shop in Murfreesboro. If your house has good bones and tired rooms, start with a walk-through and a written estimate.
Related reading: why a plain wall can make a room look unfinished and what interior painting actually costs in Middle Tennessee.
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