"Greige" or The Painting Failure

This is the saga of painting the living room. Buckle up, settle in, grab some popcorn, and continue on. It's a long one, and it's about pain paint. A nail biter I know.

There's one thing I've wanted to do since we signed away our life and bought this house--paint. Of course there are a ton of things I want to do, but painting is so easy and relatively inexpensive in comparison to demo-ing bathrooms and such... Within a relatively short amount of time I had all the paint colors for the entire house picked out in my head. I wanted a color scheme, and flow, and all that jazz. Our house doesn't have an open floor plan so I wanted the colors to help with that and not make each room feel even more sectioned off. Anywayayayayyyy....

Our living room is on the smaller side so I wanted to stick to a light color. Grey is really popular right now, and don't get me wrong, I love me a good grey, but I wanted something a little lighter. A little more beige. Something known as "greige." Problem is, I had all these colors in my head, but my head doesn't know paint chip names. Thus began the search to put a name to these mind colors.

Did you know greige is apparently very hard to find? Ok ok ok. It's not that hard, but it is when you have this exact color in your mind and you can't find it no matter how many paint samples you put on the wall. I told Nate I wanted something light, but not white. Kinda like the color white is when it has shadows on it. He just gave me a blank stare and said "Good luck with that." Followed by "Take a picture of the Paint Man's face when you tell him that."

After a few paint samples on our wall, we found "the one" and off we went to buy our gallon (along with a beautiful grey for the bottom half of he hallway--we have a chair rail... I'm digressing. We're talking about the griege here.) Since I love to paint, the second we got home I start slapping that lovely subtle greige on the wall.

Hmm....

This is kinda white.

I like white? Maybe it just needs another coat.

Another coat later...

Ok this is not subtle anything. This is just blatantly white.

And now my eyes are blinded by the brightness of it.

See aren't your eyes bleeding too a bit??

Really these pictures aren't doing the paint's radiance justice. 

Nate doesn't think the paint got tinted like it should have, but I can't exactly go back to Lowe's and say "Hey, I know there's less than half a gallon left in here because I painted my entire room--twice--but I think you messed up." Also, what am I going to say... this paint (called Woodland Bedroom White) is white?! 

Now before you get all judgy and say "Mary Helen... what were you thinking??" I will tell you what I was thinking. The paint did not look this white on the paint chip nor on the wall when we did the sample. So maybe something was wrong with the paint. I dunno. We will never know. However, it has to go. We can't keep the lights on at night because the walls scream at us with whiteness. 

What happened next should probably be left off the blog because as the bestie said, I was one paint sample away from her calling Intervention and sending me to get some help. 

No... that's not all of them.

I had to switch to Home Depot because I know the Lowe's Paint Man was starting to worry about me as well. Even Clare was giving me the "Mom, just pick a color already" look every time she woke up and found herself in the paint section yet again.

At one point the mosaic of wall colors was driving me to try my hand at mixing my own paint. Nate stopped me and said that I had to just pick one. I decided to try the one that kept catching my eye, and I used it to paint over all the other paint trials on the walls. The more I painted, the more I realized that my greige did exist and it was called Stonewashed by Behr. 

I went and got myself a gallon today. And as I type I'm watching the hubby put it on the wall (he's a painting expert.) 

I'm in love.

With him and the paint, of course.

Once the room is "finished", I'll do a before and after.