I have always struggled with finding the right shade of paint. It is something that I think I am improving on, but I still find myself second-guessing my paint choices long after the paint has dried. The paint process itself is not intimidating to me; I have painted almost all of the walls, ceilings, doors and trim of our 3100 square foot house since we moved in five years ago. But finding the right shade is still a learning process.
When we first moved in, every wall in our 30 year old home was either yellow or pink, and I quickly slapped paint on the walls shortly after moving in to simply cover up the ugly colors taking over every square inch of our home. However, now that we have been in our house for five years, I am reinvestigating other paint colors to try in our house. When we moved in, I began painting every room of our house a different color, and it began to feel a bit disjointed. I am finding now that I am repainting our rooms the same colors or very muted neutrals so that they all blend together. I want to give the house the cohesive feel it needs.
I think the biggest reason I have such a hard time finding the right colors is that I tend to pick out the jewel-toned, brighter colors, when I am really looking for a neutral tone. Gray tones are particularly hard to choose, and those are the shades and colors I like most. Thank goodness for Pinterest for allowing me to search for the most popular colors and giving me the ability to see the color in many different rooms, lighting, etc. That is truly the only reason I have become more successful in this endeavor.
Here is a before, after, and then another after of our dining room. When we first bought our house, the dining room was a burgundy which was fading into a terrible pink color over time. We decided to try a bold color in that room, and we went with a bold green. While I loved the color, it never really matched the furniture we had purchased for that space, and so it always felt a little off to me.
When I was on maternity leave with Nathan, I bit the bullet and started searching for colors that would go with the rest of our house, but still give us that statement we were trying to make with that room. Our dining room is the first room you see when you enter our house, and it is a formal dining space. I honestly do not really care for having a formal dining space since we never really use it, but being right off of the entryway it has to be finished. I like to think that someday, when the boys are older, the baby gates are gone and it is easier to navigate into the room, we can have nice Sunday dinners in there.
The room still does not feel 100% done to me. There are still a few finishing touches that need to be completed. I would like to change out the current chandelier to something a little more dainty. The furniture is so big and formal in there, I feel like there needs to be something much lighter and airy added to the space, like this:
We also need a new area rug in that space, since our cat has destroyed it. I know exactly which one I want, too:
I want to incorporate some more pops of red into our home, and I think this carpet will help us do that. We have mostly blues, grays, taupes and greens in our house, and while I love all of those colors, I think a nice red would warm the house up a little bit. I love this color palette:
A prime example of my struggle is the front door. The front door is one of the first things we painted when we moved in. Not only is the shade of green wrong – I was aiming for a calming, sage green type of color, and we ended up with a spring green – too yellowy-green for the red brick on the exterior. I also had never painted a door before, and the paint job is terrible. Now that I have painted a number of interior doors and know the correct technique, I feel confident I can make the front door a bit better. Nevertheless, life goes on and we never got around to repainting it, and so the limey green door stayed. Now that my husband has been focusing on refinishing our wooden garage door, I felt it was time to get door color right.
I found a great color palette online, and I think this is really going to work well with our brick. I think this is exactly the direction I want to go in. I will post updates once the front door and garage doors are completely finished.
a life well loved 