Painting Shutters + Awnings on a 1941 Small Cape Cod House

Our little cape cod needed some exterior updating. The siding is white and the aluminum shutters and awnings were white with a teal trim. It wasn't the worst color choice but it was starting to chip and it was clearly brush painted, so it never looked great. We labored and stressed over colors before going with Glidden Premium Glazed Granite Exterior Latex Paint in flat finish.

New Year's Resolution: Kitchen

I hope everyone had a nice Christmas! It's time for me to start getting the Xmas stuff down, and that gets me thinking about getting back on track with this house. It's so easy to get distracted from the onset of fall, isn't it?

I think my next target is going to be a room that got a slight makeover, the kitchen.

We painted the walls a nice, neutral gray (from a 90's puke puce) and replaced the linoleum (what was left of it, a fake parquet wood linoleum), per the POS.

Glidden Pebble Gray and Armstrong Slate Sand & Sky

Those minor changes got the room looking presentable. I'm left with the cabinets and this vent thing above where we put the refrigerator.

It's supposed to be a vent for the oven but upon poking around upstairs, it has not one, but TWO 90 degree bends, and it's not powered! I've been itching since day 1 to take a sledgehammer to it and howdoyalike that, Guy got a sledgehammer for Christmas!

We also have a newer, smaller, deeper steel sink waiting to replace the old, shallow one. I'm torn on cabinetry. I'd love to suck it up and have a consultant come in, but in that world I'm also Princess of the unicorns.

Weird vent thing upper right.

Could I move around cabinetry I already have? I think it would like nice to put shorty cabinets over the fridge after that vent wall is knocked out. Then I need to think on countertops and cabinet colors. Accent lighting has to happen in here, too. There's no window by the sink!

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.

Living Room Color

I had no problem choosing the color for the kitchen, but I've gotten countless color swatches for the living room. I want something green, but without too much yellow. Or blue. Or too dark.

Nothing seems perfect.

The closest I've gotten is a Benjamin Moore color called Creekside Green and a Glidden called Hazy Sage. The colors on the walls now, I was not so affectionately calling "Banana Cream Pie". My husband said it was more like something else, bananas foster or banana split or mashed banana mashed banana. We found the almost *exact* match in Glidden. BANANA CREAM PIE.

Mm. Anyway, the color is offensive to my delicate sense of style, and incredibly warm, giving the room a sickly orange cast. Maybe now you can understand why I fear a green with too much yellow in it.

Benjamin Moore "Creekside Green"

Glidden "Hazy Sage"

What's in the room:
Crystal Spider Lamp in "Pewter"
Mainstays Poly Duck Strip Curtain in "Palm"

Hometrends Welgrove Floor Lamp
Sofa and Loveseat in "Stoked Midnight"
Erias Home Designs Suave 49 in. x 13 in. Framed Mirror, White (3)