Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Picking a Paint Color

I’ve been day dreaming about painting my living room Martha Stewart’s Bay Leaf for about 8 months… (Here, here, here, and here.) As part of my Mother’s Day gift, Hubby said it was time to make my green walls a reality. WOOHOO! Of course I go on Pinterest and start second guessing myself… I had pinned these fabulously green spaces when I was first thinking about it:


{click on the picture for the source}
I was sold. My goal for the living room is to bring it out of it’s current monotone drab state, and brighten it up with a happy green. We need to bring in some energy and spark some contrast with our taupe, espresso, and chocolate brown furniture. But then I saw these:


{click on the picture for the source}

I loved the peacock walls with apple green accessory combo. Since we have a lot of green accents in the living room already, I picked up a few teals and slapped them up on the wall, thinking this was a no brainer. I am a teal girl. I love teal, peacock, and all versions of blue-green.
But these samples just weren’t doing it for me. They were either too neon, too dark, or just not wow-ing me. I even mixed my own color combo, toning down the neon-ness, brightening the too dark, but it still just wasn’t quite right. We don’t get a lot of natural direct light in our living room, thankfully during the summertime, but it makes it very cave-like, especially with a darkish color on the wall. Hence my thought-process for a pretty green. So here’s how our living room walls look right now:
DSC09226

Clockwise from top left: 1) Custom color using Martha Stewart Plumage + Behr Caribe + Behr Mermaid Harbor. 2) Martha Stewart Bay Leaf. 3) Behr Moss Landing. 4) Behr Caribe. 5) Martha Stewart Plumage. 6) Behr Mermaid Harbor

Color #5, Martha Stewart’s Plumage is the same color that’s in the Pinterest pics I pinned… the two on the right. Totally not the same color, right?! Amazing how colors don’t look the same when you put them in a different room. They don’t even look the same when you put them on different walls, which is why I painted the samples on our other 2 walls. The picture above is the darkest corner of the living room.

DSC092281) Behr Moss Landing. 2) Martha Stewart Bay Leaf. 3)Custom color using Martha Stewart Plumage + Behr Caribe + Behr Mermaid Harbor. 4) Behr Caribe. 5) Martha Stewart Plumage.
6) Behr Mermaid Harbor.
See how the Bay Leaf (#2) looks minty on this wall? The Moss Landing (#1) looks baby poop-ish? The Mermaid Harbor (#6) looks less neon. The Caribe (#4) goes really well with my blue kitchen, but I was thinking I was probably going to paint that anyways. Maybe a light grey. But you can see how they all look TOTALLY different on this wall.

And then there’s the big wall:
DSC09229
Bonus points for snapping the pic with my name on TV! Ha Ha! New housewife on RHONY commercial.

1) Custom color using Martha Stewart Plumage + Behr Caribe + Behr Mermaid Harbor.
2) Martha Stewart Bay Leaf. 3) Behr Caribe. 4) Martha Stewart Plumage.
5) Behr Mermaid Harbor. 6) Behr Moss Landing. 

And then on this wall I like the Bay Leaf again. It’s totally bazaar. I think I might just bite the bullet and go with Bay Leaf, and hope that once its on a whole wall, it looks like it does in the pictures. It’s actually in the peacock inspiration pics – top right, in the background. That looks like the exact color I want. But put it in my room and it looks a little minty. I’ve been carrying the Bay Leaf swatch around for so long, I thought I was sold on it. I have at least one swatch of it in every room in my house.

What do you think? I’m sure part of the problem is not having primed the walls, so the taupey-grey color is playing some tricks on the tones of my new colors. When did picking a paint color become this hard? I’ve never waffled so much about a paint color in my life!

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