Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Going with the {Color} Flow

You know that I have been stressing out about a living room color since December.

I painted the kitchen way back when in Glidden's "Pebble Grey" without much thought to the other colors in the house. In February we painted our bedroom a gorgeous teal, Color Place "Mysterious Ocean Fog".

Gray + teal = green in the living room, right?

Only I hated every green. Anything with too much blue looked far too close to my Mysterious Ocean Fog bedroom. My other options were a brownish green and a yellowish green.

I hate brown and the living room is already yellow.

Poor Guy. Every time I'd say, "yes, this is the color, let's pull the trigger," he'd come home the next night to a whole new set of color chips.

Last night my same saint of a husband found an incredibly useful website called Encycolorpedia

You put in a name of a paint, a hex code, whatever, and it gives you a WEALTH of information on the color. It even provides you with the closest paint colors by multiple manufacturers. Hell, it even gives you matching car colors!

Before we knew it, we were creating a color flow based on paint colors that were already on our walls. All we needed to do was find something that we liked that was "closely related" to our chosen color, which in this case, was our bedroom. The hex code of Mysterious Ocean Fog is #9db1b0

Mysterious Ocean Fog Color Flow
We were pleasantly surprised to see that our "oops" paint from Walmart in the back entrance hallway was strikingly close to Ash grey. Even moreso when we noticed our kitchen Paint, Pebble Grey, was a nearly identical match to Gray (x11 gray)!

That left us with a couple choices, while completely eliminating months of manually picking out greens we liked then grew to not like at all.

We tried Cambridge Blue, Pastel blue, and Cadet grey.

Benjamin Moore has a very nice color visualizer, and I recommend getting a well lit, high quality picture of your room (panorama, if you can) and uploading it there. Paint till you're blue in the face.

Cambridge Blue (Benjamin Moore "Appalachian Trail" / 633) was too minty.
Pastel blue (Benjamin Moore "Blue Stream" / 1668) was too light.

We clicked Cadet grey and grabbed the Benjamin Moore color "Comet" / 1628 and we really liked the look of it!

All along, we tried to put green in the living room to make the bedroom seem bluer, and we never though to go blue in the living room, and let the bedroom be the coastal green!

I'm excited to get some paint this week and get started. The woodwork needs just a touch up with my Behr high gloss white in there and it'll be finished.

Here's my color flow, I'm only missing colors for the office, bathroom and hallway.

Little Cape Cod: Create a Color Flow for your home

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