It was decided sometime a week or so ago, that this particular weekend was go time to ‘finally’ repaint the living room as well as its adjoining walls. This means all the way up the stairs, down the hallway to the front door, and of course the living room itself. I was a little edgy at first, but when it came down to it, i think somewhere in me was itching to paint and get it done with. Plus, it’d be nice to have our own colors in the living room.

The leadin to the weekend was spent taping and painting shoe molding white. The original colors we picked were intended to be a sage green as an accent wall and a lighter beige color. The house had originally a darker beige on the walls that was fairly nice, and this dark ‘doo-doo’ brown as Laurie refers to it. We liked the beige alright, hated the brown. So the idea was to get a lighter color for the beige and a soft sage green for the other accent walls.

Then the spackleing and primer began.. it took a while, we were up till 2am on Friday night, but it got done. By far my least favorite part of painting. Saturday morning comes, and I begin to put the beige on. The paint looks OK in the can, the little blob they put on top of the lid looks like what we wanted. I put it on the walls and……..

Houston we have a problem…

It looks yellowish, and bright. Panic begins. I wonder maybe its the light, maybe it’ll dry a little softer… hmm ok i start edging more stuff, just to see. A few minutes later, Laurie comes over to look at the progress, from her job of finishing up some taping. She looks at it for a little while, and says “does this look a little odd to you?”. I respond with, “it looks yellow doesn’t it?”

Full panic mode ensues. We furiously open up the ‘pastel based’ green. Things aren’t looking good just from opening the can. We get out of a brush and brush some on the wall and look at it. Look back at the yellow and look back at the green. This situation will be later refereed to by Laurie as “It looked like we’d gone crayola on the walls when we first started”. Thats exactly what it looked like. We sit down, put painting in a full stop and think. A discussion follows. I decide to call up home depot and ask them about the properties of their paint. Maybe we can take it back, because its not what the paint swatch looked like? Maybe we can do something!!!! I talk to this paint guy on the phone named Lavelle. He tells us to bring in all of our paint and he can see what he can do with the color to adjust it. He says to ask for him specifically. He’s the man, the main paint guy… the coloring guru if you will.

We get to Home Depot and the Guru of paint helps us out. He gets our beige looking more like a lighter color of what we had before, which is what we wanted originally. Looking at the contrast of the two after the fact, it seemed a little crazy that we thought the original would be similar. It helped that Laurie found the old paint, for the previous wall color. Smart thinking. Next was the green. What to do about it. The Guru of Paint suggests he can put in the same color that he put in the other paint, into the green, to bring them a little closer together to match well. Ok that sounds like a plan.

Crisis averted. Paint is saved, and no more money is spent (except on a few buckets and extra paint supplies we needed anyways). We paint all the walls that need to be the tan beige color. It takes quite a while, but we get it done, and its looking real good. Like really really good. I don’t think we could be happier with it. It almost looks like we wouldn’t have even needed a second coat (this is later to be realized inadequate, but for now it makes us feel good). We look at the adjusted green now with a wary eye, and look at the walls its to be put on.

Now here’s where I need to add a little something. The original plan was to do the first color’s two coats on the first day. Then finish up, and do the next color’s both coats on the second day. Some events outside painting and the whole color fiasco lead us to do the second color on Saturday as well, and just finish up the edging on Sunday after the first color had time to dry and we could put some tape on it again. This way we’d get a lot done on Saturday, and just have some finish up stuff and a second coat of the second color on Sunday to worry about. Plans good. Plus it brought us to another shocking realization.

I’ll just finish this tomorrow. Cliff hangers are fun, plus this post is already long enough ;)