Painting Woes

Okay. I have been working on this living room for MONTHS, which happens very slowly when extra time, money, and energy all converge into one moment (a rare event around here!).

So, the next project, as I have been saying for a while, was painting the walls. I thought this would be the easy part. But paint selection was, for some reason, very difficult. Figuring out what looked good in the light of that room, and then the mood we were going for, making the actual choice, and then getting my husband on the same page. Whew. That took weeks of staring at different colors on the wall.



Isn't this lovely. This is what we gazed at in puzzlement for weeks, in the daylight, in the evening, at night, as we finished stripping our beam, scraped the popcorn off the ceiling, primed it and applied a new finish.

It was clear to me that I loved the Sherwin Williams Hearts of Palm. It is not a pastel, that's for sure. It's cheerful, uplifting, sunny. That is just what we need during the long, dreary Pacific Northwest season called FallWinterSpring, where is is gray and rainy, or gray and snowing, or gray and just misty. On the above picture (I don't know why our wall looks so distorted - it does not look like that in person!), the Hearts of Palm is the color to the left of the dark green that we first chose a few months ago and rejected as soon as it was on the wall.

So, the choice was made and all we had to do was to get it on the walls. I had already primed with my favorite, good-for-everything primer, Zinnser 1-2-3. So I took my little paint strip from Sherwin Williams and went to Lowes to have it mixed into their main brand. They said, no problem, we have Sherwin Williams' formula for Hearts of Palm right in our computer. They mixed it and home we went. Later that night, when the kids went to bed (fingerprints avoidance technique), I started painting. It didn't look right, but I am tired, it is dark, and the last thing I want to do is start questioning my paint color choice. But it does not look right. Where's my sunny pear green? I reasoned that maybe it just needs to dry and it will look right. Right? Wrong!



Where's the sunny-ness? Where's the cheerfulness? This has too much blue in it, where's my yellow? I WANT MY HEARTS OF PALM!!!!! All that agonizing over a color - I am not compromising at this point.

So, with encouragement from some helpful folks at the HGTV message forum, I am going to take this paint back and start again. Yes, I want to be done with this room. But I want it done right. I have this picture in my head about the way it is going to look one day, and I am holding out for that. If it takes me all summer!