Fun with Sherwin Williams Color Visualizer

One of the most challenging aspects in planning for our new house, for me, has been deciding on our colors. It was never a strong point before my TBI, and it's a lot harder and slower now. The Sherwin-Williams Color Visualizer has been a great help. (Other paint companies have their own visualizers, but I've used SW because we knew all along that we would be using their no VOC paint).

You can either use one of their stock photos for different rooms (very helpful when our home was only an idea), or upload your own (much better once the walls are primed). I haven't used the site since we decided on our colors a few weeks ago, but yesterday, Niels and I were in the house at different times and both were struck with the same thought that our great room wasn't quite right.

The hearth is still covered. It's concrete on top, and the bottom will be painted white as well.

The fireplace has been really hard for me to visualize and if you've been following along, you can read about how we've struggled with the design. Our surround inspiration finally came from another Charis home.

We love the clean white lines of the wood and hope that by not using tile, it will sustain a timeless look.

We are really happy with how the fireplace turned out, especially with our electric fireplace insert.

I think the inspiration fireplace works because they have the accent wall to bring out the white. However in our great room, something still seemed off, even with the trim piece we put above the fireplace.

We have white trim in the windows and on the baseboards, but other wood accents are stained espresso, like the stair cap, foyer niche bench, mudroom lockers and of course, the kitchen.

The stair rail is stained espresso with white trim underneath.

It's hard to see in this picture, but the molding of the kitchen cabinets matches the molding of our fireplace.

This picture was obviously taken before painting, but shows how the great room is  open into the kitchen.

As Niels and I talked about it last night, we both think the solution to tie everything together is to stain the mantle. This is where the color visualizer helped us decide that the cost of redoing the mantle is worth it.

Mantle as is

Colorized stained mantle.

Fireplace and stair cap as is.

Colorized stained fireplace and stair cap.

Now to tell Todd...