After I took photos of the glass tiles in our kitchen the other day, I turned my camera on the dining room to get a few better photos of my dream chandelier for our "our tour" page
I love the light it casts on the ceiling. It looks pretty cool in daylight, but at night it's even better. Even better than those glow-in-the-dark stars that magically showed up at night that all my friends had stuck on their ceilings when I was a kid.
And while I love the chandelier, I'm not loving the wall color below the chair rail. Don't even get me started on the trim color, it's tinted yellow to match the bright yellow that used to be in every room in the house. And "paint trim" is one of those things on our to-do list that is going to require a whole lot of time and just-take-a-deep-breath-and-dive-in to get done since the open-ish floor plan means we can see every room on the first floor and I know I won't be able to stop once I start. As the resident painter, it feels like a daunting task. Maybe I'll start this weekend.
Anyway, the wall color below the chair rail is Benjamin Moore's Silver Half Dollar which is one shade darker than Iced Cube Silver, the color above the chair rail, in the living room and stairwell to the upstairs hallway. Silver Half Dollar reads more blue in artificial light, above, and in daylight, below. It looks like the most perfect gray ever on the swatch card. Even held up to the wall, the swatch looks like the most perfect gray ever. Clearly my blue eyes aren't working well when it comes to gray. Does it not look totally baby blue here?
I thought it all looked a little too blue when we first painted, but we were painting in the middle of a blizzard and the paint store wasn't open to adjust the color. Plus it was way more our style than what we started with. But now that we're looking at tile for the back splash in the kitchen, it's time to address the gray issue since the walls in the kitchen are the same color as the lower color in the dining room: too blue. So I went off to the paint store and snatched up a bunch of "gray" swatches, including some that are more green-gray, just to see how they look in our light. (Disregard the shadow in the upper left, I broke my camera lens and need to get a rental while it's repaired.)
The one vertical strip shows the current colors. Do you think the lower color on the swatch matches the lower wall? Someone please tell me I'm wrong and that the bottom two colors match our walls perfectly.
A few of my favorites are Whale Gray and Stonington Gray, at the left here:
And Coventry Gray and Gull Wing Gray here:
I also like Pewter. S's response is, "they look gray." Sigh. I asked him to call his mom, an interior designer, to come over to help me choose the right gray, but he refused and said maybe he'll ask her tomorrow and we can feed her some pizza bites as an appetizer. Whatever it takes. I think I'm just drawn to the more blue grays just because of the tan O.D. in our house in Florida, which we never repainted because it was neutral enough for a house we'd only own for three years, max. We just don't want to go for a tan or yellow tint.
I think the first step is probably to paint a section of trim ultra bight white to see how the current wall colors render with our ideal trim. But then the question is where do we go from there? Do we go for an upper and lower re-do with Gull Wing and Whale grays? Just the bottom with Pewter? Is Stonington the way to go despite its brownish hue? For the second time this week we need some inspiration! What are you favorite grays?Labels: dining room, inside, inspiration, kitchen, painting
