The Hold Up

I was enjoying a fun (and long overdue) visit with my friend Amy this morning and as our girls were playing and we were chatting she asked, "So, what's going on with the paint?" As I'm sure you recall, I'm supposedly all ready to start painting our main level and upstairs stairway/hallway. Well, there is one hold up....

 I may have spotted a photo somewhere (I can't remember if it was Pinterest or a blog) of a lovely neutral colored room that someone had painted in their home. I took a closer look and in the caption discovered that it was a color I had previously considered for our project, Manchester Tan (and if you've never seen that blog, bookmark it!). This of course got me thinking. I glanced through the comments that some others had left and one was from a professional decorator who just raved about how Manchester Tan is the perfect neutral and it's one of her all time favorite colors and she recommends it to all of her clients. Well great. Now I'm having a major attack of commitment phobia! Did I make the right choice? Have I examined all of my options? Did I rule out Manchester Tan too quickly? Would I feel the same upon a second look?? You probably don't know this, but when we painted our living/dining rooms the first time I had carefully selected a color and then promptly started looking for a new color once it was on the walls. We literally started over with new paint a couple days later and repainted the entire living/dining room. So you'll understand my paranoia and desire to avoid that circumstance again this time around.

As a result of said photo/blog/Pinterest/whatever it was, I am sort of back at the drawing board. The trouble I'm having is that I like colors when they're on the chips from the store, but when I try to hold them up to the currently blue wall and/or paint swatches on the currently blue wall, they look completely different and I feel like I hate them.

For example, these two samples look barely off white next to our couch.

But on the wall, the top one reads pinkish and the bottom reads very yellow. And both are a lot darker than they seem on the chips. 

I really don't want "brown" paint. I don't want to feel like we're in a cardboard box or paper bag. I just don't know how to go any lighter when I'm picking paint chips in the store as the ones I'm choosing are all just a step away from plain old white. The names of the two above are "Creamy White" and "Maritime White."My plan is to paint some larger swatches to hopefully eliminate so much of the effect the blue is having. Being opposite of oranges/yellows on the color wheel, that is what it emphasizes in these paints. It's great to be able to see what the undertones are, but I want a more accurate idea of what it will look like by itself in the whole room.

By the way, the same swatches are barely visible against the neutral we have in our kitchen which is also getting painted. I'd use the same color we have in there now except I have no idea what it was. Fail. If I had been a blogger at that time, we wouldn't be having this problem, haha.

So we'll see if the bigger swatches help. Otherwise I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do. There are still options out there, and I can always go with Manchester Tan just because. Stay tuned. Hopefully a decision will be made this week :)

PS- These trivial little photos of paint swatches on my walls are all courtesy of my new iPhone 4S! So handy!