Friday, June 15, 2012

My Blue Heaven

We had our house built eighteen and a half years ago. I had no problem picking the paint I wanted - Croissant by Sherwin Williams.  It was the perfect golden tan neutral - not too dark, not too light.  I loved it.  For the last few years before I retired my office was basically the same color, so I was surrounded by it almost all day, every day. 

At some point a few years ago, I decided I'd looked at that color long enough.  I wanted blue. A watery, hint-of-aqua blue.  NO baby-boy blue. I searched and searched. After two years of samples and painting stripes and spots on the walls and asking friends and family for their blue preferences, I finally settled on a color - Winter in Paris by Valspar. It looked perfect. It's a kind of greenish, grayish blue. I painted three large areas in three separate places. We lived with it for a couple of months, and it still looked wonderful.

We bought paint.  We taped and edged. We opened the cans. The color looked perfect.  We painted.  I suppose in the excitement of finally getting it done and also painting in the evening when there wasn't as much natural light, I didn't notice that it didn't really look the same on the walls as it had when I painted my samples.  But after having enough of it done that we weren't willing to re-do, I realized that what I had ended up with looked exactly like what I didn't want.  Baby-boy blue. 
Not sure how it happened. When the light is right, it occasionally does look perfect.  But by golly, we're going to live with it and love it!  Now I just have to pick colors for the bedrooms.  That should take another couple of years!

4 comments:

  1. I painted our bedroom about two years ago and went through your same process. At first I really liked it because it definitely brightened up the boring builder's beige but now I'm ready for a change. The problem is the 20 foot ceilings in there (I'm afraid of heights) and the fact that it took me three whole days to paint it last time. UGH. I'm going to live with it for a while....

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  2. at least u took the dive and did it. My ENTIRE house is white and my hubby is getting tired of it and we haven't even been here a year... I'm waiting till the builder does the one year to go paint nutty.... Terri Im hosting a swap if you want to hop over and play...id luv to have u
    hugs,
    tabitha

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  3. Hi Terri,
    Can you please email me your address and info for the swap...I sent you an email but it may have been sent to spam
    hugs
    tabitha

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  4. I'm with you about blue, but I'll bet its very calming in person!

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