2014 is finally here. I don’t know about you but for me it came up faster than any past year I can remember (although I think I say that every year).

Hopefully you all had a wonderful holiday season and New Years with family and friends. We were lucky in that we were both “on vacation” from Christmas Eve through New Years Day so we were able to get some work done around the house as well as some relaxing and visiting with family and friends.

The major home accomplishment was that we picked out and bought paint for the ENTIRE house. If you’ve read this blog before you may know and that we haven’t had the best luck picking paint colors in the past… the condo guest room, half bath and house front door were all pretty big disasters. We’re taking them as learning experience.

We choose to believe that after three BAD choices now we know what we’re doing (we hope) and due to time and money we decided not to do any test paint swatches (GASP). I know, I know it’s against all decorating advice you’ve ever heard. How can we be so sure that we won’t massively screw up again? Well we can’t, but we’ve learned a few things:

• Paint colors always look brighter on the wall than they do on the paint swatch ALWAYS
• We don’t like bright colors on our walls (a problem since the “muted” colors we’d picked in the past all ended up being super bright)
• We need to pick colors that are much lighter than we think we want to get the color we actually want

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We went to the paint store with a list of swatches we wanted to pick up based on other blogs I’d read about great paint colors, searching on the Benjamin Moore website, and of course the holy grail of anything home decorating – Pinterest. Then we picked up additional colors that spoke to us in the store and brought it all home.

There were a LOT of colors. It seemed completely overwhelming however once we got started the process of elimination was actually a lot easier than we had thought. There were even several cases where looking at a color on the “list” for a particular room we both said not for this room but definitely for this room. Having a couple of items in each room that were staying helped too.

For the large kitchen/living room area we held up the swatches to the cabinets, countertops, couch, painting and curtains (that we bought but will wait to hang until after we’re done painting – so be patient). Interestingly the color I thought I wanted Revere Pewter – in fact I hadn’t even picked a back up color didn’t work. It looked great in the kitchen area but was too close to the color of the and the aforementioned curtains. The pretty “greige” of Revere Pewter was just much to beige next to them. We ended up going with a color that Ken grabbed on our way out the door that helps pull in all the turquoise accents while still giving that cool neutral feel.

To see just how many colors we went through in our mad dash through the house here are the rejects:

And here are our choices. I will go into more detail as I post the finished painted rooms one by one. As I said ignore the writing on some of the swatches. We wrote room names on them in the paint store and as stated earlier some rooms got switched… you’ll also notice a lot have no room name written on it showing how many we picked out of the random pile off of our original list. I think we only went with 2 or 3 original picks and not all of them are in the originally intended room.

They all look very similar in this photo, and even when looking at them in person. However from we’ve learned in the past once its on a big expanse of wall the differences – the now subtle undertones of green and blue – will be greatly magnified while still having a nice cohesive look and feel. We’re confident that this time our picks will be more what we’re looking for, and from the painting we got done over vacation that appears to be the case so far.

So what do you think, do you like our cool neutrals?