Perfect Paint

So far husband and I have been cruising smoothly through the dangerous waters of rehabilitation. For the most part, we see eye to eye on where we want to take our Darling Duckling house and the items we disagree on until we can find a way that pleases both of us are far and few in between. Phew! Crisis averted!

After plenty of years living with swine and other neutral shades of beige colored walls we are so ready for color on our walls without turning our home into a primary color pre-school nightmare (well, except for the Little Man cave, I suppose). There is teal and turquoise, blue and yellow - all beautifully offset against crisp white trim (yeah well, not in all rooms yet. I'll get there. Promised)

Our entrance hall aka vestibule or antechamber stretches over 2 stories and opens into 3 rooms downstairs, all of which are or will be painted a different color. Clearly we needed a neutral color that works with all of them.
Paint chips to the rescue! We kept paint chips taped in the order/layout of the rooms taped to our bedroom wall to see if they worked and kept working for us even a few days later. Finally we settled on Valspar's "Milestone", a soft creamy Latte color that looked great with all of our other paint chips.

That is, until we put it on the wall.
I disliked it immediately. So did the husband.
We gave it a night to dry, hoping it'd dry to a better color more like the paint chip.
It didn't.
Major FAIL.
It was awful.

On our textured walls it was akin to ocre baby poop smeared all over the place. So not a good color for us! Funny enough, I still like the paint chip.

We emptied our bag of paint chips onto the big capstone of our porch outside and began rifling through the bits of color. Yes, yes, no, no, maybe, no, not bad until we'd separated the wheat from the chaff. The winner in the end was yet another National Trust for Historic Preservation color (notice a trend?) - Woodlawn Colonial Gray. Off to the store I went, grabbing a gallon of The Chosen One.

Here's the husband painting the parts I can't reach. What can I say - I'm short, and scared of heights to boot. Husband is tall and brave, and that makes us a great team :o)

[in progress]

Woodlawn Colonial Gray is the perfect type of "greige": soft and soothing and very mellow without being a dingy beige and with enough personality to play the leading role in our entrance hall. We are madly in love with it and are actually considering using it in our dressing room and master bath as well.