When we bought our house, one of my first priorities was to get the main living areas painted. If you remember from our first post, the living room, kitchen and front entryway were three different colors sharing one small space. The basic theme of the whole house was “90’s wine country”, a theme that was carried throughout the house in terms of color scheme, light fixtures, floor tiles and kitchen tile.
Here’s a snapshot of where a few of our walls brought all the colors together:
Alongside that medium-stained oak, which I also cannot stand. I called it the “Barney the Dinosaur” paint color scheme.
The first step was to choose paint colors. I scoured Pinterest and blogs looking for ideas, searching for help on how to design a whole house color palette. Here’s the blog I found the most helpful:
7 Steps to Create Your Whole House Color Palette
I knew I wanted to use cool and soothing tones in my color schemes. I also knew I would want to focus on greens and blues since Jordan’s and my favorite color is green and blue is complementary.
Another blog that I found inspiring was LiveLoveDIY. In the end I actually wound up using some of the paint colors used in that blog.
The first room I wanted to paint was our dining room. As it was basically off-white to begin with, I had an empty canvas to start with. I went a little crazy with paint color samples.
We’ve been shopping mainly at The Home Depot since there is one within 20 minutes of our house, so our paint brand of choice is Behr. Fortunately for us, Home Depot can mix up most brands colors using their color matching system, so I was able to get samples of paint colors from Benjamin Moore and Sherwin Williams as well as regular Behr colors.
These were my choices for our dining room:
I was looking for a nice slate blue. These five from left to right are:
Behr Intergalactic
Behr Blue Metal
Behr Sled
Behr Distant Thunder
Behr Whale Gray
After much deliberation we finally decided on Behr Blue Metal, a grey-tinged navy blue. It was pretty close to the slate color I had in mind.
I painted the room in about 12 hours, which was pretty good considering all of the wainscoting there was to paint as well. For the wainscoting I used Behr Ultra Pure White in semi-gloss. The main walls we decided to use an eggshell finish since it will be easier to clean than the matte finish that was already on most of our walls.
The finished product! We still haven’t bought a new light fixture, but I would love to put something like a knock-off Restoration Hardware orb chandelier in this room.
Maybe one day. I can dream!
I’ll fill you guys in on the rest of our painting projects later.
Until next time!
jordanpluskate 