Ah the living room! I am so excited that the paint colors have been picked, finalized and are up on the wall! What a time we had picking a color. I have a really great curtain fabric that I found at a home fabric store in the Fashion District in Downtown LA last January. It's red!!! I love red. It's such a pretty paisley home dec fabric, and I only paid $2.50/yard. Anyone who knows fabric knows that's amazing! I got 10 yards of it then and there. I was bound and determined to use this fabric for my curtains in the living room. Then we moved in and well...
Don't mind the mess. I've come to terms with a move-in mess. Ours has gone on for a while, but I'm painting then unpacking.
Anyways, yeah, that green... It's a great color for the blog, but the living room? NOT GOING TO WORK! It's just so green, and the curtains are going to be a lovely red. Hello Christmas! Not happening.
So, I started trying to figure out paint colors once I finished all of my painting upstairs, and also our couches finally arrived as well. Long story, but we finally got them after three months of crazy. I didn't want to pick out a color that would clash with the couches or the curtains. I went to Sherwin Williams during the last big paint sale and brought home a ton of chips. I thought I had the colors picked. I found this really great greige and a pretty red. Nope! It looked fantastic on the 2 inch paint chip, but once I got the paint samples I realized this is not going to work. The red was too cherry, the neutral too gray.
Isn't that fabulous fabric?
At this point, I was very thankful I had decided to get actual paint samples. I didn't do that upstairs and basically got lucky. I highly recommend paint samples if you really are going for that just right look. After talking to Joe, we looked at pictures online. He was very patient with me and my million ideas. I looked at a lot of living rooms on Houzz.com and realized that I kept gravitating towards the living rooms with neutral walls and great colors in the curtains, rugs and pillows. I decided to scrap the red accent wall. Too hard to match that red or even coordinate it.
I got another sample of a more yellow neutral. I was sure this was it. I painted it and even loved it. After living with it on the wall for 3 days though, I didn't love it. It was way too peachy.
Wow, does that green look limey or what?
At this point I was pretty frustrated. I'd been looking at paint colors and trying to pick a neutral for goodness sake for a week now. How hard could this be? I took the two neutrals into the nice lady at Sherwin Williams and said I wanted something in the mdlld. Not peachy, not gray. Just neutral. Ha! What a thing to ask. She was fantastic though and helped me find Softer Tan! Yay!
Here are the pictures of the walls, freshly painted, no kick plates reattached, all of the furniture still in the middle of the room.
Overall, I am very happy with the color. I'm excited to get the outlets and switches all changed out, the furniture in place and some curtains made with my pretty fabric! I'm thinking right now that I will make a Roman shade, but I'm up for other suggestions and ideas. The rest of my to do list for this room include finding THE coffee table for us, finding and refurbishing an old dresser for the entertainment center, possibly finding a rug, and hanging a gallery wall up the stairs and some behind the couches. Yep! That's still a lot of stuff to do, but I'm not going to stress about it. I want it to be right and not just done. So I'll wait until I find the right pieces and make this ours over time.
~Katie
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