Picking paint colors is fun, challenging, and just a bit frustrating. Michelle and I starting painting the house today. For a variety of reasons, we didn’t have much time to actually paint, one of the reasons being that we had to go buy the paint this morning. We had already picked out the ceiling paint, so we only needed to pick it up.
We’re still in the process of picking out most of the rest of the interior colors though. (Exterior colors are selected but not applied) It’s really quite challenging to look at a one inch square color on a piece of paper and visualize how that will look on a few hundred square feet of walls. Fortunately, Benjamin Moore sells little sample pots for about 260 of their colors. Of course, like every other paint manufacturer, they have thousands of paint chips, and can match any color you bring in. Those samples are really helpful though, so we’re sticking mostly with them. (This is sounding like an ad, isn’t it. Sorry.)
You start off looking at a one square inch or smaller color printed or painted onto a piece of paper. You think “ooo, that looks awesome!” or at least “I think that will really go well in the living room.” You buy a tiny sample pot of it if you can, or a quart of it otherwise. You bring it home, shake it up, paint it onto a two or three square foot patch of wall. Then you think “holy $&!* what was I thinking?!?” Repeat a few times. Finally, you end up with colors that you’re willing (and hopefully excited) to live in for the next five or ten years.
While we were sampling exterior colors, I discovered pretty quickly that the colors looked different if they were painted on part of a board versus an entire board. I ended up getting half a dozen scraps of siding and painting each one entirely in a given sample color. Alas, this isn’t quite possible with the interior colors as we don’t have scraps of sheet rock anymore, and they’d be the wrong texture anyway.
We attended a house warming party this afternoon for a friend of mine with whom I commute to work. They have a nice little house about five miles away, nestled just slightly into the foothills, on a really deep lot. Their rear neighbors have a half a dozen small goats which remind me of my childhood since our neighbors had goats and chickens. But I digress. We walked into the house and the second thing we did was check out the paint jobs in each of the rooms. Jill and Josh did a great job painting. The colors are vibrant and rich. The clean execution comes across as professional though they did the job themselves in about two days. All of the colors look really good in their respective rooms. Okay, time to tie this back in. A couple of the colors made me think “those colors would not have looked good as a three square foot patch on a white wall.”
You start off with a chip which is way too small. You put it on a patch of wall and it’s still too small. And the surrounding color (in our case plaster white) provides a contrast which won’t exist at all once the walls are fully painted. In addition doing a spectacular job on their paint (and furnishings and yard …), Jill and Josh also took what looked like a leap of faith on the colors. And they won.
As we continue on our quest for the right colors, I’m going to keep that in mind.
Oh. And the PG&E crew for our area is down to one person right now. Until they get one more worker back from injuries or pull one in from Oakland, San Francisco, San Rafael or Pinole, we’re sitting in a holding pattern.
P.S. no more pictures at the moment. The ceiling color doesn’t really stand out from the plaster on the walls, so not much to show yet.
