Finally Getting Color on the Walls

My friend Kate made a very helpful comment on the post yesterday about my seeming inability to choose appropriate colors (i.e., colors that aren’t purple-ish). Her suggestion was to pick one or two things in your home that you love and use that as the basis for the color palette. For her, it was an ocean view poster and a Persian rug.

For me, it has been Orla Kiely patterns mostly. Although I realized yesterday that there is a certain rug in the laundry room that I have taken with me from house to house for the past ten years. I bought it at the Chicago Crate and Barrel and at the time I liked it because of the browns and greens, which matched my kitchen then. Since then, every time I’ve moved I’ve contemplated whether or not to throw it out because it didn’t quite seem to fit with the future rooms. But I’ve never been able to, which is why it is now in the laundry room. When Kate made that comment yesterday, I realized why I had always kept it; I simply love the colors.

I realized this after we took the plunge and painted the hallway with Air 04 and the end of the hallway with Petal 01. I was nervous as we put the Air on the walls. It was warm. Very warm. Not quite buttery but more like heavy cream. It wasn’t purple at all. This was a good sign. I kept going. Cutting in took over two hours or the equivalent of four Michael Franti and Spearhead albums. This is a pretty long hallway and being short not-very-tall, I had to move the ladder every three feet and go up and down for the cutting in on the ceiling. Let’s just say my glutes got a good workout.

The more I painted in the mid-day light, the more I liked it. I didn’t just like it. I was excited about it. If nothing else, the whole hallway looked cleaner, brighter. After cutting in, I just couldn’t help myself and opened up the orange can of paint. I had to put some on the wall just to see.

(To find out the results and read the rest of this post, please visit our website at www.midcenturymodernlove.com.)