Paint Color Craziness

So, we DID end up going to Lowe’s yesterday. I collected lots of paint samples but haven’t made any decisions. If you want to check them out and give me some input, that’d be sweet. Just remember that some colors look extremely different online than they do in person! One example is our master bedroom color…I’ll show you that when we get there.

All of the colors I’m about to show you are either by Valspar or Olympic (there was an Eddie Bauer color I loved, but you can’t see it online). If you want to see the colors online, open a screen for both site and follow these instructions to get to the screens where you can type in the color name:

Valspar – Go HERE, after it loads, click on any one of the color pallets – it doesn’t matter which. When you do this, you’ll see a search bar on the right hand side and it says "enter search term". You can type in any paint color I write about in there. It will come up, and then you can click on it to see it larger in the palette box on the right.

Olympic – Go HERE, click on "start choosing", and then "explore". On the bottom left it will say "search colors". Type in any paint color name there and it will come up. There’s really no better way to view the color (unless you want to keep playing with it and put it in a room, but if you’re just browsing all of my options that will take a lot more time than just typing them in and viewing the thumbnails).

K, got one open for each? Now you can just copy & paste my color names into the searches. Here we go….

Master Bedroom – Mesa Verde C65-4 by Olympic. This one was really easy to pick – this is our ONLY set color so far. We wanted to re-create our ex-master (on a MUCH, and I mean MUUUCH smaller scale). It was the simplest decision we ever made, I think. We rarely agree on something like this so easily (though Matt is much more trusting of my decorating ideas than he used to be!). The color you’ll see on the site looks like a weird, greyish pea green. It looks terrible online. Here are pictures of our ex-master (though the lighting in these is even kind of rough! seriously, it’s the prettiest green ever!!):

Oh, here we go…TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE picture of us…but you can see the color pretty well….

My Bathroom – Choosing between:

Aqua Chiffon A58-3 by Olympic
Swim 5006-8A by Valspar
Aqua Ocean 5005-10A by Valspar
Sea Wave 5006-9C by Valspar
Nautical 5007-9C by Valspar
Rapids 5004-10A by Valspar

Those aren’t listed in any order of preference – they are just how I had the paint chips piled up. I really can’t decide if I want something closer to blue or closer to green (as you’ll see they are all varying shades of a Tiffany blue, just with slightly different hues). As you look, remember that this color will be paired with a lot of grey, black & white, and then be accented with bright accessories like "the awesome kitchen".

This blue will be going in this room (with the cabinets painted black & fitted with nickle hardware, and the floor being done in a grey, slate-ish colored tile):

Matt’s Bathroom – Choosing between:

Soft Skies 4006-6A by Valspar (my #2 vote)
Coventry Blue 4005-5C by Valspar
Smoke Blue C54-4 by Olympic
Celebration Blue by Valspar (this was the color of our accent wall in our ex-guest bedroom – my vote)

In case you need better visuals, this blue will be going in here:

Living Room – I am seriously at a loss in this room. I thought I had it all figured out until a) I saw the actual tans I THOUGHT I liked on the computer and hated them in person and b) I started dreaming about a rosey hued purple in my dining room and thinking it wouldn’t look right next to the wrong shade of tan. Especially since I want to pair the purple with black & white (surpriiiise lol) and I’m not sure how it would all fit together. A few shades I deemed acceptable (though not excited about or in love with any of them):

Earl Gray D18-4 by Olympic
Sauteed Mushroom D21-4 by Olympic
Hotel St. Francis Fawn 9001-9C by Valspar

These choices are possible for this room (try to picture the purple in the dining room as you can see it in the 2nd picture):

Dining Room – I was totally at a loss with this room (and may still be, if I can’t get these two colors to cooperate), and now I’m really being a stickler about it. I picture this rosey purple paired with black cafe curtains and my black framed beveled mirror hung on the other wall shanked by either sconces or pictures, all matching the black light fixture (that I actually like!), as well as our black-backed chairs. I just have the issue of the adjoining rooms clashing. For the living room, it really needs to be the RIGHT shade of tan, especially considering that my accent choices were maroon & brown (to play off the recliner). And the kitchen? Well, as you’ll find in a moment, it’s staying the way it us until next tax time. So can it cooperate with cream & blue country wall paper temporarily, and then play nice next to whatever color it ends up being in the future? The original "inspiration" color that got me dreaming of this shade was a color by Eddie Bauer that I can not only NOT show you online, but I lost the paint chip!! It was smaller than the others and must have fallen out of my pile somewhere. I know it started with a C….

cassias or something like that??

Okay, I was totally wrong! You CAN see it online – I can even copy the URL so here ya go! (and I was right, it’s called Cassias):

However – when I saw this purple it got me interested in other shades of it, so I’m NOT settled on that one. Other choices I’m considering are:

Canton Purple 1003-7B by Valspar
Plum Legacy 1002-7B by Valspar
Grape Jelly C41-5 by Olympic

Kitchen – After considering the freaking wallpapered cabinets, we decided to leave the room alone until we can afford to re-do the entire thing. I don’t want to risk taking the wallpaper off of them and ruining their finish – I’d have to live with shitty looking cabinets for however long it took us to re-do the room. What we do know is, the cabinets & cupboards will be white, the appliances will be black, and the counter tops will either be white or black. Then the wall color will be a bright color – and I would even consider carrying over the purple from the dining room if we end up using it. But, that project is a while in the future….so for now, we have shitty kitchen with tacky country wallpaper and virtually no counterspace.

Hallways – The bedroom hallway will be whatever the living room is – mostly for ease. I just want something neutral – something to make those walls NOT white. I hate white. The other hallway (between the kitchen/dining and the mud room) will be painted around the bathroom area – but not down into the mudroom simply because it would be a PITA. So I have to decide if I want to continue the dining room color into there, leave it alone until we know what color the kitchen will be, or come up with another accent color. We’ll see!

Temporary Office/Future Nursery: Until #2 is on it’s way, I get to use the third bedroom (previously referred to as #1) as my craft space. Matt gets the entire Rec room (FOR NOW), so this is my space. Right now it’s a dark brown. I’m totally down with brown, but not so sure about having it in my craft area. It’s just a little too dark for this house. I’m not going bright in here, believe it or not, but brown just doesn’t feel "right". So, I’m going to half-way create my dream office/craft room. This includes grey walls, white & black furniture, and pink storage & decorations. Matt is actually considering grey for the Rec Room, too…which is fine since these two rooms are no where near each other. And I will probably only get like, 6 months of use out of this room, anyway. And no – it doesn’t really feel like wasted work because starting with a pretty grey will be easier than covering up dark brown when baby #2 is here. So, samples I liked are….

Cold Steel D63-2 by Olympic
Silver Threads D64-2 by Olympic
Georgian Silver D64-3 by Olympic
Steeple Grey D57-4 by Olympic
Evening Twilight C1-141 by Valspar

These options are for this room, which we will refer to as, "the lil wayne" 🙂

Luke’s Room: I had this vision of turning his walls into a sort of 3-D hockey rink (imagine the ice folded into a box – each side being a wall of Luke’s room). It would be pretty simple to do (most of it, anyway). We’d just have to pain some red & blue lines – the wall is already white & ready for it. And, BFF has a projector, so we could paint the sabres symbol at "center ice" on his wall. He has so many Sabres things already that it would be easy to put it all together – even his toy box would match the paint on the walls. But two things scare me about this. 1) Just because we’ve been saying rah-rah hockey doesn’t mean he will agree when he’s 10 (that’s not to say his bedroom will stay that way forever, but who knows really) and 2) I’m a little scared to make a room so completely gender-specific when we have limited space in this house and the desire for more babies. I don’t know who will be sharing with who at what point. I mean, say #2 is a girl and #3 comes along….no one wants to share their room with the baby, so Luke would be sharing with a sister and I don’t want her to be stuck in hockey land if she’s not into it. Of course it’s just paint, and if that situation ever comes up we can fix it at the time, but if we make a neutral decision now there will be no need for that later. So, I really don’t know what to do in here:

Opinions VERY welcome!!! 🙂