A while back, I picked out some color choices for the interior of the house.  As I’m sure you can guess, I’m a total amateur when it comes to paint, so I just pointed to pretty colors–after narrowing down the general color family I was going for.  But since we’ve decided to do a paint and primer in one instead of just tinting basic primer, the colors ended up being much more bold than we wanted.

Imagine my surprise when I went over to the house one night last week to discover a cotton-candy-pink living room!!  Yikes!  It was way too pink, even for me.  So we kind of had to go back to the drawing board, and since this task landed on the day of my surgery last week, it pretty much all fell on Charles.  But he did a fantastic job of sticking with the color families we had decided on for each room, but finding much lighter colors.

[Quick side note: who names these colors?!?! Some of them are so corny–um…Moment of Promise? I have wanted to be the person who came up with nail polish names for a long time, because they’re always so fun.  Maybe I should dabble in paint naming as well!]

By the way, they redid our formal living room in a beautiful barely blush color called Moment of Promise.  It’s really pretty, and looks fabulous with the ornate white fireplace!

My parents came in town for a post-op visit on Sunday, and my dad somehow got roped into painting color swatches on the walls with Charles.  (Actually, he says that he loves to paint, so I didn’t feel too terrible!)  After they painted for a while, Mom and I headed over to the house for my “first big outing” and to check out the colors.  Here’s what we’ve landed on so far…

Because our painter likes to work with the local Glidden store, and because we really had no preference, we decided to stick with Glidden for both our interior and exterior colors.  We still are undecided on a few rooms (dining room, kitchen, butler’s pantry, laundry room, master bath), but these cover most of the house.

All trim, for now, will be pure white.  We’d love to get down to the original wood trim, but that’s really just not feasible, so we thought white would help the house to look fresh and airy.

Kitten White- This is our main “off-white” that will be used throughout the house.  It’s a good mixed between gray and taupe…and color that we dubbed “graupe.”  (Doesn’t sound molestor-ish at all, right?)

Kitten white will go in the foyer, stairwell, downstairs side entry hall, and upstairs main hall.  Since almost all rooms are connected to these areas, we wanted to go with a very neutral color that will go nicely with the other colors we’ve chosen.

Wilton Blue– This beautiful gray-blue is the perfect mix of airy and cozy for the family room/den.  It has enough blue in it to not be too dark and dreary, and enough gray to not be too bright.  As the main room to watch tv and hang out with friends, we wanted this room to be comfortable and inviting.

Snowbell– This calm, serene color will be used in our master bedroom.  It’s a lovely pale blue (NOT Carolina blue!!!), with a hint of lavender.  I love it because there are so many bedding and rug options to go with it!  We also plan to use this color with some white tile and cabinetry in the downstairs bathroom off of the den.  It complements the Wilton Blue perfectly!

We are still trying to decide if we want to continue this color into the master bathroom and closet.  I think that we should leave the closet white so our clothes don’t end up looking different in the closet than they do outside of it.  What do you think?

Fresh Cut– We got this color to try out in the dining room.  The room was painted green before, and the tiles in the fireplace are green, so we just wanted to see how that would look.  Green may look fine, but this color was way too minty for our taste.  We think something a little darker with some more gray in it might work better.  But when we put it in the upstairs guest bedroom, it looked perfect! That room gets a ton of sunlight, and the green just looked so natural in there.  So we are going to keep it for that room.

We are still very torn on the dining room.  Still thinking about wallpaper for the upper half of the room (above the chair rail), but that will have to come later, after we get a feel for what will look best in there.

Artic Night– We decided on this for the office.  As you know, we want a dark, masculine office with lots of leather and wood.  I was leaning more towards a dark teal, and Charles more towards a hunter green, so we met in the middle with this navy and I think it’s better than any other color we could have chosen!  I’m in love!

You can also see into the master bedroom from the office, and we think that the Artic Night and Snowbell will really go well together.

Del Mar Shores– We haven’t actually settled on this yet.  We originally picked out a very light coral color for the second guest bedroom, but it turned out to be a lot darker than we had hoped, and just looked like salmon.  And not in a good way!  So we unanimously nixed that real quick.  Although I have never been a fan of yellow, it seemed that a house of this era could stand to have just a hint of yellow somewhere.

So we have picked out Del Mar Shores for that bedroom, since it isn’t overwhelmingly yellow.  Hopefully we can get a swatch up this week and decide on that for sure.

Alright let’s hear it…what do you think?  (Keep in mind that the pictures don’t necessarily do the colors justice, and they often look very different depending on the light!)

All color pictures are from My Perfect Color.