Paint and Prejudice

Back in the early part of summer we got some of our deck replaced. Because the deck had been painted in the past, we were going to have to paint the new boards to match. SOB had planned to do the painting himself, but every time he had a few days off to complete the project, it would rain like a mother. After several weekends and even an entire vacation week rained out, we called a painter. A guy and his crew came over and painted like crazy for two days, and now we have a painted deck.

While they were here, we got to thinking. A large majority of the wall space in our house is painted
yellowgold. I'm sure I mentioned this before, but some previous owner of this house was a MEGA WVU fan. Most of the upstairs is WVU
yellowgold and the carpet, which we had ripped up right before Fred was born, was blue. There were blue ceiling fans, even. Now the
yellowgold isn't objectively horrifying, but it's not great. Also, as a photographer, it really sucks. In my kitchen, everyone looks like they have cirrhosis of the liver. Even babies:

A grey card helps, but not entirely.

We inquired about the cost of painting over all of the
yellowgold and found that it wasn't nearly as expensive as we expected. But. BUT! There is always a 'but', isn't there? They wanted to do the job ASAP, so we had to pick out paint colors right quick.

Now, we had our bedroom painted not long after we moved in, and I'll just say that there are still some very raw, unsettled feelings about those colors. In summary, I don't like the colors SOB picked and SOB blames me for giving him the go-ahead on those colors, and we can't talk about this without things ending badly, so we just don't. ever. talk. about. it. Needless to say, I wasn't optimistic about our ability to select paint colors for 50% of our house without it coming to blows in the aisles of Lowe's. However, colors needed to be agreed upon. Luckily, we have a lovely and intelligent babysitter who suggested that we paint some patches of the wall to see how different colors might look. With that in mind, we set off to Lowe's with a spring in our steps.

We came home with four rather beige paint samples, which worked out perfectly. You see, in our kitchen we have four large framed portraits of the kids, all hanging on the same wall. I took down the pictures and painted four beige squares, two of my choosing and two chosen by SOB.

Mine are on the right, and SOB's are on the left. He argued that mine were too pink, and I countered that his were too grey. Things were off to a rocky beginning. However, two days later we were back at Lowe's to give it another try.

This mish-mash of colors had some we liked and some we hated. BUT! We were making headway on coming to a consensus. It was really eye opening to see how different the colors looked in the light of our actual home. On the cards, colors that looked almost identical were wildly different in tone. After one final trip to Lowe's, here are the four colors we ended up with:

The two mid-tone colors are going to cover the bulk of the walls, and the lightest and darkest will be accent colors. All told, we went through thirteen paint samples to end up with these. And the best part? The fucking names of these thirteen nearly identical shades of beige:

Hopsack

Moose Mousse

Desert Fortress

Woodrow Wilson Putty

Mesa Tumbleweed

Holmes Cream

Balance

Oatbran

Lovely Bluff

Cream In My Coffee

Cliveden Leather

Lyndhurst Gallery Beige

Sand Storm

(A major award will be given to the person that correctly identifies the four shades we selected.)

The painters came on Friday to mask and tape, and the real painting begins first thing this morning. Keep your fingers crossed that we make it through this with our marriage intact!