Painting...A Few Weeks Ago

I am SO REMISS in posting about the house. It's been weeks since we painted...so here. I blame Daylight Savings Time.

When I was at Home Depot picking out paint colors, I narrowed it down to a few different combinations and brought the samples over to the cabinet section to hold them up against my cabinets. This was the best combo I found:

I LOVED it! The only problem was, I wanted to use the darkest color on one wall as an accent, the middle color everywhere else, and the lightest color for the trim, but I didn't know if the dark color was going to be too dark and make my huge front room look small. Fortunately, Home Depot has little baby sample paint jars, so I took them home and painted a few coats on my wall:

And then...I stared at them. For two days. It just seemed so...dark. I was looking for input from everyone I knew. Half of my friends and family said the darker color was too dark, and the other half said it would be fine (and dramatic) because it was such a large, well-lit room.

So I went online and read up as much as I could on multiple-color paint schemes, and on the Behr website you can plug in your colors to a sample room and see how they look, so I did:

And it looked fabulous there. But I was still worried about it. So when I went in to get my paint mixed, I asked if there were any way I could get the same colors but slightly lighter, and apparently they are magic and can mix colors at 50% or 75% saturation. I decided to go with 50%, because the employee said that if it wasn't dark enough I could bring the paint back and she would add in more color.

So we spent two days putting primer on the walls: two coats. The paint that was on the walls was very old, and we had to cover up all the new drywall, too, to ensure good adhesion with the new paint.

Here's Scott, with his primer war-paint on:

So cute.

Anyway, so after we got the primer on, Kwiddens, Scott and I started painting with the lighter color, and...it just looked...too pale. So, I took all the paint back to Home Depot and had them add more color, and when I got back and started painting it was PERFECT. So, we continued to paint, and got only one coat done each day because that room is HUGE and very tall, so Scott had to get onto the very top of our ladder to paint near the ceiling, and the whole thing made me very nervous because he wasn't holding on to anything at all.

Anyway, we got all the walls that would be behind cabinets and the half-wall done, and the color is beautiful, but my camera sucks so I couldn't really get any more good pictures (ok, I didn't try very hard...) but when I get the pictures of the cabinets up you will see how awesome it looks!

I still have the rest of the kitchen and living room to paint, but that can wait. I just need to make sure I get it done before we decided to put flooring in.