A new color in town

Last week I talked about our plans of turning our stark-white master bath into a calm and soothing retreat by making a couple of changes which would - along with more changes to our dressing room/walk-through closet and master bedroom - turn our three-room master suite into a more cohesive unit rather than a jumbled threesome of connecting rooms. You can read about that here and here.

One of those changes included a common wall color in all three rooms (along with lots of crispy white trim, batten and board and maybe, one day, bead board). I wanted to tone down the stark contrast in the bathroom without going to white and after many pictures of very neutral, light and airy bedrooms had caught my eye on Pinterest, I knew that an off-white, light beige would probably fit the bill for all three rooms.

Paint chips to the rescue. I made a quick trip to every available hardware store in the area and returned with a bucketful of paint chips in all shades and hues of beige:

In the end I 'winged' it. I dropped into the store, grabbed a beige paint chip that seemed to fit the bill and called it a day. Call me Mrs. Spontaneous. If anything, I have learned that no matter how bad the paint fail, you can always paint over it so choosing a paint color does not give me a headache. At all. "Cultural Colonial Beige" looked great - a soft greige that wasn't too close to our beloved Woodlawn Colonial Grey.

Meet "Before".

Initially, after demoing what used to be the upstair's kitchen, installing new subflooring, building a wall to create two rooms and tiling the master bath, we just gave the walls a fresh coat of white paint to make them look and feel clean. While it did just that, it also turned our bathroom into a cold white box.

Progress!

I started with the wall with the most fixtures because I felt like this would give me a better idea if I liked it or not. Truth be told, at first I didn't like it at all but after our experience with the dining room (I did not like the color at first either, but husband convinced me to finish the room first before changing our mind and whaddayaknow, in the end I loved it! And not because I didn't want to repaint the room ...) I decided to paint the room until the bitter end.

Surprise - as I rolled on the paint, it began to grow on me.

This is probably the truest color representation. There's no mistaking it for anything but beige but light has an interesting effect on the color. In bright sunlight (of which we have lots) it's a soft light greige. With fading light it progressively warms up to a true beige which means that a brighter overhead light has moved up in priority ... heh.

Finally: "After".

Compared to the white walls before, the soft greige color on the walls make the room feel slightly smaller and cozier and brings out the moldings whose bright white pop against the warmer color on the walls. It also picks up nicely on the off-white hue of the tile and the fixtures.

Classy-sassy :o) Even mixing the metals is working!

While I'd have never thought I'd paint any room in our house beige (after living with off-white and builder's beige in rentals for too long), seeing how this is all coming together is making me very happy!