Remember way back in December/January when totally NAILED IT with our master bedroom and bath colors? Well, it’s time for a lesson in color humility. Here’s a quick list of our recent lessons learned.
1) Using leftover paint from one room for another is not efficient. You will have a new bucket of leftover paint.
2) Lighting and carpet color will completely change a paint swatch from wall-to-wall (and even on the same wall). Observe samples in all lighting conditions before buying the bucket.
3) Paint HUGE swatches. That 1x1 square ain’t gonna cut it.
4) If you don’t love any of your samples … try more samples. It’s still cheaper than buying a gallon of regret.
Lesson 1
A few weeks ago, I decided to take the half bucket of leftover paint from the main floor bath and paint the green room a less radioactive green. I figured it was a small enough room that I could probably get it all covered in one coat.
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| Cutting in with the half bath paint. |
Uh, yeah. That didn’t quite work. I got through three walls and then ran out. But I could tell it would need a second coat, so a quart wasn’t going to cover it. Once it was all said and done, we now have a half bucket of green paint left. And we’re not thrilled with the bathroom’s green in this room. So, lesson #1) calculate before you try to be efficient; lesson #2) just pick a color for that room instead of trying to be “efficient.”
But wait! It gets better!
Lesson 2-4
Last week we got the itch to do something about the Blue Room, i.e., the guest bedroom. It is a very saturated and immature blue, in our eyes, and I was pretty much done with it. This is the second biggest bedroom and its future is in flux.
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| Blue room during walk through |
Right now it’s the guest room, but once there’s a kiddo in the mix, do we turn it into his/her room and move the guest room into the green room at the end of the hall? But what if we have two kids? We are pretty much guaranteed a room war if Kid #1 gets the Big Room and Kid #2 gets the Small Room and its #2’s own fault for being born second, etc. I guess the solution there would be to move each child into the smaller bedrooms and turn the big room into a guest room/Mike’s office (and force Mike to keep it tidy, at least when guests are coming over). But, of course, Kid #1 is going to resent moving “down” in class.
Obviously, we’re overthinking it here. But this logic fueled our color philosophy. We wanted something transitional, so it works with a guest room/nursery/mixed use room, so we don’t have to decide the room’s future right now. It’s a great guest room until we’ve got a munchkin in the mix.
So, we were looking at greige and grays. I favor blue-toned grays, and Mike immediately struck those down in his quest to keep me from painting the whole house blue (justifiable fear, folks). Yellows, reds, and oranges were out, too. So, we went through several chips of warm-toned grays (brown, sometimes greenish undertones) on the primed walls to narrow down our sample picks (NEVER choose off a chip alone!).
It’s amazing how something can look gray on a chip, but the moment you put it on the wall in your designated room, it can completely change. Many of our chips went instant beige or brown (a purple popped up here or there). The lighting in the room was definitely murky yellow at night and the brown carpet wasn’t helping matters.
We narrowed our sample selection to Olympic’s Quill and Valspar’s Granite Dust and Notre Dame (the latter two on the same chip set).
We threw Quill onto the wall … and it was an instant NO. It just looked like bland beige, not remotely gray. Paint color looks different from bucket to wet application to dry, so reserve your judgment, but this was a no all the way through.
Notre Dame, a darker greige, definitely had more beige in real life than the chip, but we did like it on some walls in some light. This had been my favorite while just on the chip. But ... it was falling out of contention.
Granite Dust was even darker and intriguing. A hint of green came through this darker gray and we both wondered if it might be too dark for the room, but it definitely looked more interesting that the other colors. We increased the size of the swatches to get a better idea and kept gravitating to Granite Dust.
There was hesitancy in both of us, though we did not clearly voice it to one another. I googled the colors to see how they looked in various rooms online. GD did not look as dark as it did on our walls, so I figured it must look so dark because it’s against the white primed walls.
So, off I went to get our bucket of Valspar Ultra (it was covering better in the sample than Olympic, and I was unimpressed with my last Olympic batch). Brought it home and started cutting in. The sun started going down. Mike came upstairs from working on another project and uttered the fatal words.
“Huh. It looks like camo green.”
“It’s still drying,” I said, though I could see what he meant. But I told myself the paint was going on so nicely as I cut in, covering so well, and the big sample swatches on the wall still looked good. And the paint did seem to be drying toward that color.
I got halfway around the room before stopping for the night. Each time Mike came in, he reiterated that he didn’t think it was the right color for the room. While the swatches still looked okay, down around the trim and carpet, there was a definite brown-green tone coming through. It no longer looked gray. On some walls it was fine, even in the yellow light of night.
Was it a mistint? I painted right up to one of the swatches. Once it dried, there was a slight difference with the bucket paint being a hair browner, but it wasn’t enough to call it a mistint. Could it be the difference from the satin sheen of the sample to the eggshell in the bucket?
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| Can you see the difference? |
I was frustrated, both with the time and money spent on this color and that Mike now proclaimed he was never sold on it. After some tense discussion, we decided to see how things looked in the morning and go from there. Mike suggested rolling one wall to see if maybe the color would look less army and also change out the ceiling fan light. So, we went to bed hoping we wouldn’t be $30 and a Sunday down.
In the Monday morning light, I still liked (not loved) Granite Dust and hoped a lightbulb change would do the trick. After work, we reconvened in the no-longer-blue room and assessed the color. Mike swapped a bulb and there was an instant improvement (the other light had been a yellow 13-watter). But we couldn’t unsee the camo tone on every wall. Would it improve with white trim? Every picture online showed this color with white trim, and we had decided to go ahead and paint our scuffed trim. So, everything should right itself … right?
Mike was adamant that we shouldn’t waste our time forcing a color to work. It's just not worth it. So, it was back to our chip stash. It was time to bring blue back into play, so we grabbed some samples from our master suite decision days and brushed them on the walls to see how this tone would play. Surprisingly, Mike really liked the unabashedly blue Palisade, but we agreed that it was too blue for what we envisioned (and would be too similar to the Previous Owners’ choice). But it did give the green light for blue. (Ha ha).
We also played with the light Silver Leaf, which had a faint silvery blue tone in previous rooms, and Gravity, the glorious gray we love in our master bath. Gravity lost its vibrancy in this room and looked like a muted gray with violet undertones … not bad, but not great. Silver Leaf looked okay, but it just seemed lighter than what we wanted.
We decided on four colors, two lights and two darks: Olympic’s Cold Steel, Silver Threads, and Steel City and Valspar’s Polished Silver. Back to Lowe’s!
Silver Threads, like other light grays before it, turned beige. Instant no. It’s interesting that Silver Leaf did not do this when they looked very similar on the chips.
Cold Steel wasn’t bad, but it just looked dull, but I could see it working nicely with a darker gray if we striped a wall (we aren’t that ambitious). I loved Polished Silver as it went on and continued to love it as it dried. Steel City was also intriguing. It definitely has green coming through but in a cozy-not-camo way. Mike cast his vote for the City, but I was torn. Would it be too much for the room? It was a darker, deeper tone, but if you’re not going to have fun with your guest/whatever room, where would you?
As I primed over the Granite Dust cut in, Mike googled Steel City and Polished Silver to see how it performed in the “real world” and various lighting. We could find plenty of examples of PS but nothing on SC beyond the online chips (which are subjective to monitors and site settings). As I leaned toward SC for the adventure, Mike switched over to PS, because “there’s probably a good reason why so many use it.”
I should be doing a victory dance, because I had initally argued in favor of PS. But instead I’m more torn. The “not just another gray” aspect of SC is wooing me, even though PS is a good--and dare I say it “safe”--color. I don’t want the same color as everyone else, but at the same time, I don’t want to be repainting in a year or two (or next week).
We can always add some vibrancy with the built-in shelf and desk area (which has always been in our plan), and of course, window treatments and wall decor will change the room, too. Honestly, I think we’ll be fine with either color.
And tonight we chose the color and began cutting in. Stay tuned!
