We’ve lived in our current city home for 20 years. When we bought the house, the walls had been “newly” painted in colors that seemed to be in line with the times and with our taste. The living / dining room was painted in an olive-green sort of tone, there were yellows and beiges, blues, and tans in other rooms of the house; there was even a coffee brown in the bathroom. The tones generally tended towards the earthy side of things and were a bit on the darker side. For the most part, we’ve lived with these original colors for the duration of our time here.
The blank canvas of our new property had both Ed and I considering paint colors for the first time in a long time. I think both of us were done with the dark / earthy tones and were looking for something lighter. When originally discussing paint color options, we threw out colors like pale blue, light seafoam, pale green, pale lavender, light grey. Also, for the past 15 years or so, I’ve really been drawn to the white on white cottage aesthetic when browsing through “Country Living Magazine”, looking at Pinterest, etc. and Ed is O.K. with it (I’m not sure it would be his first choice, but he likes the simplicity of it).
After much back and forth, we finally did settle on a basic bright white (we tell ourselves that we’ll accent with pops of color). Now off to the paint store! For at least a couple of months, whenever I was in a home improvement store, I would look at their paint colors and shades of white. So very many shades of white (and that’s not even considering the ivorys or the creams)! What?? How to decide? Look again at my magazines and at Pinterest and analyze the white paints. Go to a store that sells nothing but paint and get a paint color “fan deck”. Go back to the home improvement stores and get paint cards/samples. Bring the fan deck and paint samples to the property to get a sense of what they’d look like in “our light”.
Finally – a decision: Home Depot’s Behr Paint Brand’s Ultra-Pure White. (It just so happens that this is their base color for all of their paints; we were told that if we changed our mind, we could bring the paint back to the store anytime and have a color added at no cost; while I’m fairly sure we won’t do this, it was nice to know.)
Once the decision had been made (I mean really made; no longer the back and forth, etc…), we were ready to purchase the paint. Everything would be Ultra-Pure White (the ceilings, the walls, and the trim). This made things easy (even though we did need to distinguish between ceilings, walls, and trim for purposes of purchasing the appropriate sheen). All we needed to do was calculate square footage and go get our paint.
Luckily, Ed noticed that Home Depot was having a Memorial Weekend paint sale. The moon and the stars were aligning in terms of our budget! We bought our first $800 dollars worth of paint (I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at the cost; but I was). After we painted the upstairs bedrooms (of which there are 2), we knew we’d need more paint. Again, lucky for us, it was just in time for the July 4th weekend paint sale. I think we now have what we will need to complete our painting project.
Let the painting “begin”!
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