Now that our house is FULLY on the way to being ready for us to move in this week, there are a few things that need to get done: fixing holes, painting, shampooing carpets, cleaning, general moving, etc.
But I'm here to talk about the paint. Instead of keeping it all white, which is what the house started out to be, we decided to paint the down stairs grey and the upstairs dark beige-ish.
Our adventure began at Lowes (because they give military discount, woo hoo!) where we grabbed a few choices of grays/browns that we thought would fit well.
*fair warning, my spelling of 'grey' will flip back and forth between A-E. I'm English and American all at once, heyyyyy.Anyways, we decided on a brown that I cannot remember the name to save my life. Sorry. But it turned out a little lighter than we hoped, but still absolutely gorgeous! The grey we picked...not so much. We wanted 'Voyage' by Valspar which looked like this from the little sample that we got
This is the exact color from the website and everything (it looks a little lighter on the card sample, but still grey enough). So we got 10 gallons of it and dropped it off at the house for the painters. This was our biggest mistake. Neither of us have really 'painted' anything this large before. I mean I've done my DIY crafts and painted a bunch of little things and some furniture, but never any walls of this scale. What we should have done was get a small sample and test it on the walls, but we assumed that the grey would be grey and nothing would change because they are white walls to begin with so no real priming was needed.
After the 1st day of painting we went to check on our house to see how the paint looked and make sure everything was going smoothly. When we walked in and...everything was blue. No, I am not exaggerating, everything downstairs was BABY
BLUE! My first initial thought was that the painters did something wrong like mix the paint or add too many chemicals or something for the it to change colors and that's what I get for assuming.
My high school math teacher once taught me that assuming is making an ass of u and me: [ass=u-me]. Excuse my French. Well I should've listened to him because I was definitely the donkey because we took the left over paint and tested it and low and behold it rolled on blue. We were in complete shock, how can something so grey turn out so blue? Well it did and we were screwed.
This isn't a super great picture because A. we don't have much lighting in the house yet, and B. because the blue was SO INCREDIBLY hard to capture on camera this is the best we could get. As you can see, we had to go back to Lowes, literally about 5 times to get samples of every shade and semi-shade of grey they had. Starting from the left, the first shade was too dark, the 2nd too brown, the 3rd too red, and the last too blue & dark. Thankfully, the 4th shade we tried was perfect. And guess what? It was on the same card just one shade over from what we had originally chose. KILL ME NOW. But all in all, we learned our lesson: NEVER TRUST THE PAINT SAMPLE CARDS, oh and
of course, to test the paint out on your wall.
So as of today, the paint should be done by tonight. I'm praying it looks good (even though it did when we tested it) and that everything else goes smoothly and isn't a wallet draining mistake.
I also just used your standard spray paint and then rolled/brushed on the white paint. Some of the areas were tricky like the legs because of the grooves but nothing a teeny tiny paint brush couldn't fix.
