Picking Paint

To help the house fit our style and personality, we're repainting some of the rooms. The fun part of repainting is looking at the seemingly endless rainbow of paint colors to choose from. It's like a super-sized box of crayola crayons: tupelo tree, front porch gray, waterscape...there are shades of colors I never even imagined.

Joel and I are earth tone people, so we're all about greens, blues and browns. Since most of the common areas upstairs are already shades of brown and beige, we're going to do blues and greens in the other rooms. But while I know what general color I want in each room, I'm finding picking specific paint colors to be more difficult than I thought it would be. Will this shade be too dark? Too light? Too much of a yellow undertone? I've found the Sherwin Williams room visualizer to be an incredibly helpful tool. But even with that, I knew I would need to test the paint chip in the actual room. How does the color look with that exact room's natural light? Artificial light? Morning sunlight? Evening sunset? I want the paint color to be perfect.

Armed with a handful of paint chips, I spent at least a half hour in the office and then the kitchen, deliberating the fate of the room's color. I started in the office. I held up the post-it size swatches to each wall in the natural light. Then turned on the artifical light and tested on each wall again. Narrowed it from six to four. Turned the light off. Turned the light on. Narrowed it down from four to two. Recircled the room. Changed my mind and swapped one color for one I had discarded. Turned the light off. Turned the light on. Recircled the room. Narrowed it down to one. Recircled the room. Changed my mind. Turned the light off. Turned the light on. Circled a final time. Went to the kitchen and went through the same process. Then came back to the office and recircled with my final selection: tidewater. It's a light blue with gray undertones.

The best I could do with the kitchen was narrow it down to two colors: great green or ryegrass. Tonight I'll have to make the final decision.