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

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.

Paint and Patchwork

Patch, patch, patch. That's what our back entrance really needed.

It was pretty beat up and neglected, not to mention filthy.

It's been done for about a week now (done-ish) and looks a LOT better.

Before: Was a dirty brown, the walls, ceiling and baseboards were all painted the same color. There were holes galore. The light was an old acorn style.

Someone fucking hated this wall.

After: Ceiling white, oops paint, drywall mud save the day and a snazzy new flush-mount ceiling light. I LOVE the light fixture, and it actually gives off more like than the acorn fixture.

Our $8 "oops" paint from Walmart

Hampton Bay Flaxmere Round purchased on eBay for $22!

I have some nickel coat hooks I'm going to install, probably, near the switches. I'm still devising the prettiest way to do it, of course.

Bedroom Color!

I remarked earlier on that I'm having a really hard time selecting colors.

I'm leaving the bathroom light gray.
The kitchen is now Glidden Pebble Gray
The bedroom was a beige. A really dated beige, but the true horror lies in the flowery wallpaper border.

Ugh.

A picture of the master bed from the real estate listing

The switch is cute, but not my style. Gave it to my mom!

See the border?

Well obvs the first thing done in there was the sanding and staining of the floors. Next I sanded, primed and painted over the oak woodwork.

We took the border down this weekend. Just hot water in a spray bottle and a scraper did the trick.

Since we only needed a gallon of paint, we tossed around the idea of giving Walmart's brand, ColorPlace, a try. It's nearly $9 cheaper a gallon than Glidden.

However, there aren't a lot of pictures of ColorPlace's colors hanging around the internet. The color chips are small and there's really not a substantial website showing off the colors, or even a room visualizer, so it's kind of a leap of faith.

We went with Mysterious Ocean Fog in satin, as we wanted something relaxing. It's gorgeous!

Mysterious Ocean Fog, white trim and blue curtain panel

New white switch and switchplate cover

I dig these pulls! I never know which
controls the fan and which the light.

I need to get an inexpesive rug, something to put under the bed to protect the floors. I'm going on the third weekend of telling myself we're moving in "this weekend"!