Painting the Dining Room- The Saga

We have been wanting to paint our dining room ever since we moved into our house 3.5 years ago. So naturally we waited until a week before mine and Todd's parents were coming to stay with us. That procrastination thing-worked for writing papers in school and still works today. "I work best under pressure."

Anyway, here's what it used to look like:


Click here to see all the colors we considered and eventually rejected, because it turned out that they didn't actually work out that well with our furniture.

Now for the saga. I went to Lowe's because I love Valspar paint. They have a lovely thing now called "Auditions". For $3 you can get a tiny can (maybe 1/2 a pint) of whatever color paint you want to try. So, armed with three tiny cans of paint and some practice boards, I headed home to try them out. SO Cute!


Todd painted the practice boards and then we watched for a day to see how the various colors caught the different light in the room. Then we argued over what color to choose. Click here for argument (See Letter F.)

We finally decided on two colors. One on the top then the chair rail painted white and a darker color on the bottom portion of the wall. My lovely golden color for the top, and a burnt orange for the bottom. The third color we had tried out was rejected, and I put the can away thinking perhaps we could use it to paint next year's pinewood derby cars or something.

Then I carefully wrote down the names and numbers listed on the labels of the two cans and went back to Lowe's to purchase my paint. After they mixed it up for me I did think it looked a little dark, but it's hard to tell in the lighting there and the dab of color they put on top is never dry enough to tell how true it is.

That night, Todd was doing the cutting in, so he opened the lighter of the two colors I had purchased and started painting. When I came in to start rolling, I again thought that it was darker than I remembered, but again thought that it was just because it was wet.

We had finished the entire top portion of the room before I realized that there was a problem. I ran and retrieved the third tiny can of paint that I had rejected and put away. And this is what I found.
You probably can't read that, but the color I wanted and the color I didn't want had been labeled with the exact same label! I had written down the name off the can that I wanted, but it had been labeled with the wrong label.

Here's the color I ended up with next to the color I wanted:


Of course all this happened on a Saturday night, so not only could I not deal with it right then while I was very annoyed, I couldn't deal with it until Monday. We ended up painting the whole room in the color that originally was just for the bottom half of it.

When I went back to Lowe's on Monday, the woman at customer service looked at me and informed me of their policy of NOT taking back custom tinted paint. So, I went to the paint guy. I showed him the little cans and had that "I dare you to tell me 'no'" face. He quietly took the can of reject paint and made up another of the one we needed to do a second coat. I didn't even have to growl at him.

So we went from this:

To this:
(Ignore all the breakfast stuff on the table.) So, it wasn't what I was going for, but it's done. And family is in town now. Our parents are united (if in nothing else) in horror at our color choices. We grew up in homes of white and pastel walls, so I think our parents are just genuinely confused by us.

Saga over. Until it's time to put up the crown and baseboard moulding. And curtains? Let me just say that that whole valance scarf draping thing is WAY harder than it looks!