Picking Paint Colors

Last Friday my fella and I went on our 668th trip to Home Depot this month to pick up some samples of our top paint color picks for the living room/kitchen and the master bedroom. Being the cheapies that we are I declined the .5 cent bag offer at the cashier and insisted I could handle carrying all the samples in my arms no prob. Approx 30 seconds later I was looking down at a splattered mess and feeling my face turn red. They were kind enough to give me a re-do sample on the house and this time I was extra careful as I high tailed it outta there before you could say “whoops!”

 

Right now the color palette for the home is very unsettling and harsh. I don’t want to post before pictures just yet but the living room is a dark foresty green, the dining/kitchen and hall area are a bright in your face sky blue and the master bedroom is a puddle colored brown. Definitely in need of a big change to reach the look I would like to achieve. So after some prepping with primer against the oil based paint that was already on the walls we applied the four colors. We went with ‘Pillar’ from CIL and ‘Hickory’ from Martha Stewart for the living areas, ‘Heavy Goose’ and ‘Nimbus Cloud’ both from Martha Stewart for the master bedroom. I thought I could color match Martha’s colors to CIL to save a few bucks but apparently ole’ Martha created her collection to never be color matched exactly. Very savvy of her but a bit irksome to discover since her paint doesn’t have the primer already built-in either so that’s an added expense we wouldn’t need with CIL paint.

Here’s how the colors looked against the dark green living room walls:

On the left is CIL’s Pillar and on the right is Martha’s Hickory.

 

  We settled on the lighter left color Pillar from CIL (take that Martha!). Not only is it a high quality paint that is also less expensive than Martha’s line but it also felt much more open and relaxing which is what I’m aiming for with the palette for our home. I took these pictures at around 11pm so they are fairly dark but it’s a really creamy light beige.

Here’s a small shot from my long narrow hallway painted in the sky blue:

  There’s no direct natural light in this hallway so I think Pillar is going to do an amazing job to make it feel warm and homey.

 

Hickory definitely feels too dark, it’s very close in the color to my master bedroom which I really dislike so why recreate it?

  This is the dining area at night with the pendant light on. Once again we have a clear winner and thus, Pillar (with the $ saving built-in primer) beats out Martha with a 1-2 punch.

Now onto the master boudoir where I choose some silvery grey tones to cover the dirty brown color:

Looking at them dead on they take on slightly different colors than intended to me but my fella insists it’s in my head. Every grey has different tones and shades that compose it so it will at times look like another color, it’s truly the hardest color to pick and pick right. Sometimes it’s greener or you see some purple but I think most often it comes across a little blue in it’s tone. The left is Heavy Goose which I found to be more blueish at times and the darker shade on the right is Nimbus Cloud which at times felt a bit green to me.

It was important to me that when I choose colors for the house they all mingled well together and flowed nicely from room to room. For instance walking down the creamy beige “Pillar” hallway into a bright orange bedroom would obviously be too big a shock. Grey was a natural choice to stay in line with the calm yet welcoming color palette I’d like for our home.

 

After much debate we settled on the lighter Heavy Goose. So Martha gets a point for this round but I knew she would since they are both from her collection. I have three more rooms just begging for some paint so we’ll have to wait and see who prevails in the final round.

  

We’ll be living with the colors all this week just to be sure that they look good in every light. Then this weekend we will be having at it and painting our hearts out. I’ll be sure to post some before and afters of the whole job.

*Picture credit Reckless Bliss, Pinterest and Google Images*