Finalized Paint Colors

Yesterday I met with Sue, our interior designer, to finalize our paint colors. This was by far the most difficult set of choices for me to make, especially since my eyes have been giving me problems all year. We knew the general color scheme we wanted, but Sue was a great help in narrowing down to the final selections. 

The only thing I was reasonable sure of as we got started was that I wanted to use Sherwin Williams Oyster Bay as our green because it went so well with our tile (Solistone Mardi Gras in Carrollton) and quartz (Hanstone Specchio White). 

Here's a look at Oyster Bay using Sherwin Williams Room Visualizer. It's a really pretty grayish-green.

The first thing we did was confirm that we still liked the color in the actual kitchen. Here's Sue holding up the paint sample, backsplash, and cabinet door. Whew, I still love it! In addition to the kitchen, we'll use Oyster Bay in the dinette, pantry, in-law suite, and both laundry rooms (one upstairs and one down).

Since we have an open floor plan, we needed to make sure that the other colors worked with the Oyster Bay. Our stairwall made a good palette to narrow down the choices. I put the Oyster Bay on top, then a row of grays, then a row of plums. We were looking for one light gray, one dark gray and one deep plum.

After we took out the obvious "no's," the samples started to look like a Christmas tree. With us moving the week before Christmas, this may be our tree this year! (The sagey green on the bottom  represents our couches, and that's our carpet on the floor.

  

We landed on Mindful Gray for the light gray, and Dovetail for the darker Gray. We then went around the house deciding where to use the light and where to use the dark. Here in the foyer, we chose the light gray to go with our tile, with is the top right little square.

Niels' office will have a white chair rail with Mindful Gray on top and Dovetail on bottom.

In the Great room, we're doing the Mindful Gray in most of the room with the back wall being an accent wall with the deep plum instead of the dark gray. The plum we settled on is called Sensuous Gray.

It was so helpful to have Sue. She helped me stand in such a way that I could see how all the colors looked together. Our first floor has a lot of light, which is fabulous, but making getting true colors a challenge. But here I am under the arch looking at the gray for the great room and the Oyster Bay dinette.

We had six colors to select. With the first four being our primary colors, we had two left for our almost-three-year-old. We had read that to help a toddler's transition, the new room should be the same color as his old room. So we stuck with blue. I found a really cool vintage train bedding set for his new big boy bed, and used that to determine our paint. We chose Scanda, the one on the left, because it had the most contrast  with his comforter.

In our master bedroom, we used three of the colors. Sensuous gray in our bedroom and water closet, Dovetail in our bathroom because we have a ton of natural light, and Mindful Gray in our closet and possibly on the tray ceiling of our bedroom.

For our trim we chose Pure White, which is a bright white for contrast.

Here are all the final selections:

From left,
Sensuous Gray: master bedroom, stairwall
Mindful Gray: master bathroom, office, in-law bath, master closet, mudroom, great room
Dovetail: office, 4th bedroom
Oyster Bay: kitchen, dinette, pantry, laundry rooms, in-law suite
Solaria: D's bathroom (yellow is his favorite color), D's closet, powder room
Scanda: D's bedroom