Saturday, June 9, 2012

A short story about choosing paint colors (or my journey from despair to hope)

I really don't know how most people choose paint colors, but when my MIL reminded me that it would be easier to paint before all the cabinets and things went up it sent me into a brief flurry of sifting through colors cards (of which I have too many) until I finally threw up my hands in despair. Red? Orange? Green? Yellow? I've lately seen a lot of really nice blues and turquoise tones in the design blogs I've been reading, but do I like them because they're beautifully staged and photographed rooms or because those paint colors really make me happy? I wasn't sure. Most of my furniture is stashed away under plastic while the workers install sheet rock, and all my art is still in boxes. At that moment I was convinced that it would take me a week of sitting in the kitchen shuffling with dozens of paint chips to find a suitable color. Fortunately I'm a stubborn little housewife and tend to stick with projects like this until something materializes. Enter my picture taken from Gaylor Peak in Yosemite National Park. While flailing around to find some unifying principle I could use to organize our new home I decided to go with National Parks/traveling/outdoors. It tied into something I'm passionate about, fit most of what we already owned, and would hopefully keep me from trying to paint every single room a different and totally unrelated color. Fortunately for me Sherman Williams has this nifty little "Chip It!" tool bar thing (yeah, I totally have no clue what those buttons that live under the search bar are called). Anyway, Chip It will let you find out what colors are in your favorite images. So I pulled up a bunch of images I'd posted to facebook and chipped way like mad for about five minutes. I found that many of my favorite images contained lighter, turquoise leaning blues (aka "sky blue"), gray, gold, and some sort of earthy green. With those colors firmly in mind I did a couple mock-ups of some color schemes to show Allen, and he was pretty happy. Looks like I might be able to start painting before the cabinets go in after all!

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