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!