Oh, you guys! I made a stupid rookie mistake just now. I know better than this. We are working on painting this house. Every wall needs to be touched by a paint brush. Every wall has been covered in sticky chipboard butterflies, knickknack shelves held up by 100 drywall anchors, dents and scratches and even food. I did the master ensuite (which you may have seen a bit of on Snapchat) and some accent walls in the kids rooms and I’ll do the basement too. But the main areas of the house have high ceilings so we opted to hire painters.
Last night (NIGHT!) my husband and I sat down to confirm our paint colour. I had picked out a grey with a blue ish undertone. Did he like it too? We hemmed and hawed and I flipped through the CIL Colourdeck I had on hand and then we thought…maybe it should be a bit more blue than grey. Just a bit. We found a colour we liked and gave it to the painters in the morning and they bought the paint and started putting it on the walls just like that.
With the very first brush stroke, I knew. I knew but I wanted to see more on the wall before I decided. I wanted to see it in different light. I wanted to see part of the wall in a second coat, even if it was just around the edges where they had cut in. They did most of one wall and by then I had this sick feeling in my stomach. They did a wall in the basement and I loved how it looked down there where there is much less natural light. But in the foyer, where there are some pretty big windows, it was so very wrong.
I called my husband, “you need to come home and look at it.”
He came home and agreed with me right away. It was wrong. It was SO blue. The sort of pastel blue that one might choose for a baby boy’s nursery should that someone want to dive straight into the stereotypical gender identity for a baby boy’s room. We were going to have to suck up the extra expense to change the colour. We had to buy all new paint and also cover the three hours of time the painters have spent already putting the blue up. An expensive lesson and one I will never forget because I’ll kick myself for ages over it. I KNOW BETTER. I know better than to choose a paint colour at night because we second guessed our first instinct. Than to go by the swatch alone. Than to not paint a test patch. Than to not review said test patch during all the different shades of daylight over the course of day and evening. GAH. I know better and yet, here we are. Sucking up our mistake and paying to correct it. I wish I could show you what it looks like but I couldn’t even capture the immensity of the suckage with my camera. It looks pretty good through the camera actually.
You don’t make this mistake okay? Heed my warning!
1) Always buy a test pot and do a patch.
2) Always look at the colour on your wall at different times of the day.
3) Give yourselves lots of time to see how you feel about the colour.
4) If you are going to use the same colour in different rooms do two test patches because the light will be different in each room.
In the end, I’m glad we put the brakes on and corrected our error. This isn’t the sort of paint job that I could just easily paint over again if I hated it it a few months down the road – the ceilings in the foyer are close to 15 feet high. We have this one chance to get it right and when it’s done, we’re living with it.
The accent colour that we painted a test patch for and have lived with for a week looks amazing,however, so there’s that saving grace. It’s up now on two walls in the kitchen and I’m so smitten. I can’t wait to show it all to you when we’re finished.
Ugh that is a terrible feeling when you just KNOW the colour isn’t right! We had this exact thing happen to us in our office…the first paint we picked at night and when we started painting it was LIME GREEN. It was supposed to be butter yellow. Lesson learned indeed! I’m looking forward to seeing your new home come together!