Gone Paintin'

I would swear that no color looks good in my house.

After stripping the wallpaper in my living room and dining room, I decided to use the paint I had leftover from my condo. For some reason, though, the soft buttery cream that looked so delicious in my old living room looked like grandma's cheap makeup from the drugstore.

So I picked a new color, Benjamin Moore's Beacon Gray--I think it's even a Pottery Barn color--which is one of those soft gray blues that seemed so pretty in all the magazines. I can never wait to see what it looks like on the wall so I painted a big Mark-Rothko square of it on the wall between two windows and decided I would live with it for awhile. And I grew to hate it.

So I sat with my Benjamin Moore fan deck....and studied...and pondered...and compared....and I picked another color that I was sure would be the perfect color. I went a bought a quart of it and couldn't wait to get home to put a little bit on the wall alongside a strip of the door trim. Hated it.

I thought maybe a lighter shade so I went a got a quart, ran home and painted a few new "clouds" around the room that I thought I would contemplate for a few days.

Fast forward a few weeks--okay, months--when a good friend of mine who's over once or twice a week says "THAT'S IT; I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE! WE'RE PAINTING THIS LIVING ROOM ON SATURDAY!"

So I've gathered a few of my inspiration photos, I've picked a new color and I'm on my way to the paint store.

Stay tuned.