We’ve had our living room walls patched and primed for about a month. The glaring whiteness was getting to me (I’m a big fan of color), but I tried to hold off on painting because we have many half-done projects I could be busy finishing.
Yesterday, my need for change got the better of me and I went out to get paint. I had taken the day off, and this seemed like the perfect way to spend it. Teague and I had already agonized over color chips for weeks and weeks, so I was pretty confident about what I was doing.
2 gallons of paint and 6 hours of effort later, I’m pretty sure I don’t like it. I wanted Victorian drama and elegance – I ended up with intense and slightly guady.
When I opened the can of paint, the color looked brighter and more saturated than the chip. I’m very picky about color, so I should have stopped right there. But, seeing one too many episodes of Trading Spaces, I convinced myself that it would darken up once it was on the walls. I painted one wall and took a few steps back to look at it with various lighting schemes. Yesterday, I thought I liked it. In fact, I thought I might grow to love it. But somewhere around 11pm that night I began to hate it.
This morning I thought I might wake up to find I liked it again. Unfortunately, no such luck.
Part of the problem is that we’ve got a mish-mash of goods in that room; we’ve got three different wood tones, 2 couch colors, curtains that don’t match the couches OR the walls, and a random sampling of knick-knacks scattered throughout. With white walls, you didn’t notice the color clashes quite so much – now, they seem to taunt me. Maybe once we streamline the furnishings I will like the color more… otherwise, it’s back to the paint store for a less saturated color.
Comments, Thoughts, and Feedback
The color in the photo looks great with the table and lamp so maybe you will like it more once the furnishing fit better.
I think any shade of blue can be a real hit or miss. I once painted my living room a “dusty steel blue”. I painted it all one evening. The next morning I woke up at DISNEY LAND! I kid you not, it was the same blue that Disney uses on their title screens for all their movies. I lived with it for about a week and then painted over it.
In our apartment in San Francsico, we painted the bedroom a bright though saturated green that looked solidly in the sage family. We dressed the room when we finished because that, frankly, makes ALL the difference. I heartily recommend against judging paint in a bare room. But i digress. The day after we painted we realized why the color was strangely familiar. It was the exact bright green of elementary school chalkboards. On all 4 walls, 14 ft ceilings. We repainted.
We painted our guest bedroom almost that exact color. Didn’t last long.. we painted over it a very nice baby poop yellow.
I once painted a guest room in a color very similar to the one in the photo. I had purchased that shade of blue to cover up the green that came out looking like a bad episode of baby runs.
I hired a painter to come and just put back the original khaki color.
It took a few months for me to recover and paint any other walls in my home.
I’m partial to intense blues and greens so I actually like the color quite a bit and think it picks up the lamp shade fairly well … either that or the color on my monitor is off. Color though is something terribly subjective. what one thinks look great, another hates.
I know the feeling, we have painted every room in our house no less than two times (some even more) all in less than a year and a half. Our living room actually started out in a color very similar to the one you chose. It was an awesome color but was a little more overwhelming than I expected. I had chosen the color from a picture in a magazine,unfortunately it just made our living room look small. The living room is now a khaki color with white trim, thankfully this color worked out, I am totally over painting!
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