Blue, Take Two

So we painted the living room this weekend. Twice. Actually, four coats of paint, two separate ocassions. Although we loved the warmth of our orange and yellow living room and how cozy it made the room seem (especially on cold winter nights), that room has always been really dim. Plus, we've lived with those colors for 3 years now and thought we'd like a change. I've been grooving on blue lately and suggested that it would look nice with our dark wood furniture and amber lamps, and we quickly decided to try it. Unfortunately, picking the right shade of blue proved much harder than deciding to make the actual change.

Initially, we picked out a color that was on the very gray end of the blue spectrum. Kevin really liked it, but I wanted something a little brigher. So we bought a much brighter shade, hypothesizing that since the living room was always so dark in the evening when we spent the most time in it (it faces east), the paint color would seem much darker on the walls compared to how it looked under the flourescent lights of Home Depot. We were wrong.

Saturday we got up bright and early, took Gilmore to doggie daycare to keep him out of our way, and painted one coat of primer and two coats of Ocean View blue paint. We loved the color. For a sweater. Or a vase. Or a purse. It was just too cyan for four big living room walls. And we discovered that part of the reason the room was so dark before was that the orange and yellow paint absorbed a lot of light. The nearly cyan color reflected so much light that it was a little disconcerting even at 11:00 on Saturday night. Plus, it didn't quite pull out the blue in the fireplace as we had hoped, but rather clashed with it a bit. We agreed to live with it for a week without making any changes, though, and loaded everything back into the room.

Sunday, we decided to run errands all day and thought we might as well stop by Home Depot to look at other shades of blue paint. It was the first and last errand of the day. By 2:00 we were at home with another gallon of paint, one that fell somewhere in between the bright blue that we applied on Saturday and the gray that Kevin liked initially. Luckily, we only had to apply one coat since the colors were relatively similar, and their wasn't much trim work. While it was drying, we took a long walk with Gil to get some soft serve ice cream, re-loaded the room, grilled out and settled into version 2.0 of our newly painted living room. This time, we got it right (we hope you agree; see for yourself here). It doesn't seem like a big difference in the photos, but it just wasn't quite what we wanted the first time around (just ask Katie, who saw it mid-process).

Next up, we're re-painting the three white walls in the dining room tan, changing the office to gray (no suprise that we never liked the blue in there either), and giving the foyer and hallway a fresh coat of off-white. Hopefully, we'll only be painting those rooms once!