10/24/13

road bump in decorating...paint colors

We have hit a bit of a road bump in house land lately, and it is completely my fault!  After spending the summer studying in what will be our dining room, I decided the wallpaper and drapes had to come down.  So, without a true plan in mind, we began scraping.  I won't lie, scraping wallpaper was a little therapeutic.  At times, we wondered why we decided to do it, but in the end, it was only one room and wasn't so bad.  We were lucky in the sense that there was only one layer...my parent's house had almost 100 years of terrible wallpaper when they moved into the house where I grew up.  


So, after scraping and sanding, we had walls that were ready for primer and paint.  I had decided that I wanted green walls in the new dining room.  Sort of an olive, sort of lighter toned, but not too blue and not too much like an ice cream parlor.  (The guy at the paint store loves me and my descriptions.)  With multiple trips to the paint store under my belt, we finally picked our color: 
Benjamin Moore's Georgian Green.  


Then the fun began.  
After deciding on green, I ran across this picture on Sam's blog that made me stop in my tracks.  


I loved the light tone on the wall with the contrast of the darker wood.  Living in Florida, light and airy rooms have a year-round appeal, and the few contrasting pieces really ground a room.  While color and texture are beautiful, sometimes in Florida it can just feel heavy.  So, I made two mock-ups with polyvore's new home design templates and tentatively showed Josh.  


Luckily for me, he preferred the more neutral room too!  Thus, the search for the perfect creamy/white paint has begun.  We are taking any and all suggestions, but here are a few at the top of my list.

These all look much more saturated and gray than in real life!


Any help out there?  Would love to hear about your "go to" neutral paint colors!

xo,

3 comments:

  1. hey!! we just painted our whole house. White dove is a really creamy white white - we did it on our cabinets and trim. We used a BM color called Pale Oak on our kitchen/family/dining room walls and I love it! My sister used something called Revere Pewter that is really pretty, too. I thought this was a fun blog post to peruse to find paint: http://www.southshoredecoratingblog.com/2012/04/top-100-benjamin-moore-paint-colors.html
    hope y'all are doing well! hi to josh for me :)

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  2. Hey Annie, It's your old UF friend that had the same name as you, Annie Adams :) Hope all is well. I was going to tell you to check out BM Revere Pewter as well. We are currently building a house and we looked at using that color for our entire house, but it showed to be a little darker than we were looking for. But it's worth a paint sample to slap on the wall. It's a very popular neutral color. Our cabinets are painted BM decorator's white and it is much more WHITE than that paint sample you show up there. You can look at the color on my blog. Paint is super hard...Good luck choosing!

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  3. Hi Annie! We actually couldn't decide and did a 50/50 mix of two neighboring BM colors (muslin 1037 and everlasting 1038) and we love the color. It's still light but has some color in it and very neutral and warm. Good luck! Hugs!

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