ROY G BIV

Ah.  Remember Roy G Biv from art class in elementary school?  Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Blue. Indigo. Violet.  Hard to believe that all of the colors in the world come from combinations of those seven colors.  What’s even harder to believe is that there are billions and billions and billions of colors that come from those seven colors.  That is until you start trying to decide what colors to paint your walls.  Then those billions of colors become all too real.  Just walk into Lowe’s (our home improvement box store of choice) and LOOK at all of the colors.  Say you narrow it down to yellow.  Good.  Now you only have 5 million choices.  We thought we were smart.  We narrowed our choices down to 144 colors; the Williamsburg Collection from Benjamin Moore.  It has a wide range of colors.

Our color wheel; slightly used!

We felt kind of like Goldilocks – we made the right choice, not too few colors, and not too many colors.  Then, it was time to choose. . .

And so it begins.  Now in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I have more hours of watching home improvement shows under my belt than any person has the right to.  My default channel is HGTV.  I watched This Old House and Bob Vila when I was a kid.  I didn’t miss an episode of Hometime.  So I should have known to follow the NUMBER ONE RULE when choosing paint colors – get a sample, put it on your wall, live with it in different light, at different times of the day, etc.. etc., etc.  So, there is no excuse for what happened.  Just my stupidity and frustration and desire to PICK A COLOR and get on with it.  So, after a few failed attempts (yes, we did buy a few quarts and pints and test them), I went to the paint store and purchased a five gallon bucket of the paint we thought would be perfect, the paint that would go everywhere, the paint we DID NOT TEST!  Bingo.

Sample City

Ick.  In the process of already being painted over.  Couldn’t stand it.

More ick

So, we had this gold-yellow-orange color on our walls, just in the entry, for about a day.  I was so embarrassed by how horrible it looked I couldn’t wait to paint over it.  (Maybe it’s not really a BAD color, it just didn’t look good on our walls – wasn’t the look we were going for) I take full responsibility for the mistake.  I should have known better.  And I did all of the painting over it (Well, most of it.  Of course it was on the wall going down to the lower level, which is like painting a two story room.  Terry had to re-do that part.  Thank heavens we didn’t put in on the walls in the sunroom).

Before

After

Here’s the good thing to come out of our mistake.  We re-thought our color strategy, and now we are on the right track.  We wanted color, but in the end I think we were trying for too much color.  We will have dark wood flooring and dark trim around the windows, so we have chosen to go with lighter colors on the walls.  I think that will make the floors and trim really “pop”.  I just can’t believe I am putting pastel-ish colors on the walls.  I have never been a fan of pastels, but this will work.  So, here are a few pictures of what we have painted so far.  Still lots to go; we are working our way through 10 gallons of primer and 10 gallons of ceiling paint, and need to take ibuprofen every night for our aching bodies, but, yes, it’s worth it.  Painting was the one thing we felt we could do (putting color selection aside), so this is our place to save some money – money we can put into something else.

The sunroom, in a nice, soft yellow. (Look at the view out the windows – looks like a treehouse!)

The wall from the dining room down through the original family room; same soft yellow. The round window is Terry’s office!

The window wall in the original family room; soft yellow.

The entry. Where the gold-yellow-orange color used to reside. Now a soft blueish grey.

And, just so you know that I am hard at work no matter where I am, here’s my office today:

Suite 400 open for business

It’s all so I could post a picture of the house from the lake (Ha!);

Lake view on a beautiful July afternoon

Oh.  And if you’re interested, I have a barely used 5 gallon pail of wonderful gold-yellow-orange paint – it’s yours if you want it!