Color Me Excited

You can't see this color on the photo - this is the bathroom color

Yesterday Darryl and I had a breakthrough moment - we went to look at paint colors and we agreed on the same ones with very little discussion or convincing on either side. For those of you who know us well, you'll know that making decisions is not one of our strong points (well, for one of us anyway). Yet choosing paint was painless and fun. My guess is that we were going into Dunn Edwards with such a positive outlook that the gods smiled on us and let us enjoy the moment.

That's because choosing paint seems to me such a huge sign that we're almost at the end of the journey. The big decisions have been made, the large-scale projects completed, and now things are at the detail stage. The plaster needs to be touched up, the bathroom tile is ready to go, we finished designing the bathroom cabinets and decided on the closet structure. Yes, it's the finishing details at this point and I couldn't be happier.

One of these will be the walls of the spare room

So we chose the paint for the ceiling and trim and brought home swatches to consider for the rest of the walls. My favorite thing about the paints are their wonderful names. The ceiling and trim paint is called Swiss Coffee, which sounds like it should be a warm brown, but is in fact a white with a touch of yellow. I've never been to Switzerland, but I'm guessing their coffee is a little darker than that. The bathroom paint is called Melting Glacier, which might not be the best name for a bathroom. Since we had so many problems with the plumbing, I hope we're not putting a curse on the room by giving it a paint that implies so much water that cannot be controlled.

The walls of the spare room will be a nice, warm yellow, which we think will be welcoming and peaceful for our guests. These names are much more friendly: Sheer Sunlight, Creamed Butter or Afterglow. I think we'll go for the Creamed Butter because, as I'm sure you know, everything is better with butter.

Our bedroom walls will be some combination of these
beautiful blues

Finally, we're choosing the walls of our bedroom. We have a comforter that we bought several years ago that we both love. It's a white comforter with embroidered flowers of blue, periwinkle and yellow. I had it in my head for years that we would match our bedroom walls to one of the colors on this comforter. Our bedroom right now is lavender, and we are really happy with it, but we made one mistake that we need to fix this time. When we looked at the color, it was daytime and the sunlight was streaming through the windows. But the reality is we spend most of the time in the bedroom when it's dark and the lights are on - it's a completely different kind of light and the paint looks very different. So this time around we're going to make sure we look at the swatches at different times of the day and night to see how it looks in natural and artificial light.

On the other hand, I might just choose the paint based on its fabulous name. The one I like the best is called Fly a Kite, and when I see it I start humming the song from Mary Poppins. You know, the one at the end of the movie when the Dad realizes that his kids are more important to him than any old job and he becomes the father they need, so Mary Poppins can leave them and move on to help another family. Just thinking about it makes me smile, and wouldn't that be a nice thing for a bedroom?