Why is picking a paint color so HARD!

[jmm63]

I've been redoing my kitchen for the last month and I finally got to the part of picking a paint color. I was thinking something in the creamy yellow family. I spent an hour and half looking at different colors up against my window treatments and decided on Pottery Barns/Benjamin Moores "Hawthorn Yellow" Got it home, put a coat on the wall...and HATE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Can't take it back, so instead of wasting $36 I added some plain white paint to it and thought that was better.....put another coat on the wall....and STILL HATE IT!!
Tomorrow I'm going to add some other left over paint to it and see what I come up with.. I guess there is always Beige if it doesn't work out.. oh wait... there's about 300 shades of beige...
I'll post some pictures whenever this gets done.

 

[xraytech]

I know what you mean about the difficulty of picking out paint, I usually pick something I like and once its up always seems far too bright of a shade, Only once did I get it right and it was an antique gold.

I'm getting ready to repaint my gameroom and I'm set on painting Tiffany blue, I think it is a soft enough blue and will have it color matched from the bag of my last Tiffany purchase.

 

Good luck on finding your perfect shade

 

[norgeway]

Yellow!!!

I grew up with a yellow kitchen....the retirement community where I work has darn near every hallway in every building painted at least one of three shades of yellow...puke yellow, baby shit yellow or pus yellow!!! needless to say...it dosent work for me, we are trying to find a good fifties pastel to paint our kitchen also!

 

[lokringbob]

Picking a paint color

I have no eye for colors ether, people say to much red or green or blue in a shade I don't see it. We used a interior decorator when we were choosing paint colors for our remodel. We hired her for one hour and was some of the best money we spent. She had us bring our fabrics and tile then chose a color in the shade of the predominate colors in those Items. The other and biggest advice she gave us was, in picking the ceiling paint. On the paint card that your wall color is on Pick 3,or 4 shades lighter for your ceiling paint. Example we did a Sherwin-Williams color called Latte then chose 4 shade lighter Divine white. They painted the ceilings first and with white of the drywall they looked PINK! Not the look we were going for. I bit my tongue and the next day the walls were painted Latte and the ceiling suddenly looked white. All the trim was painted alabaster and because or the ceiling having some tint to them the crown molding stood out. These may not be a shade your looking for but maybe there is a lighter or darker shade of a color you have used in some other part of your house that could carry over into your kitchen. Good luck would love to see pics of the room your painting.

 

[whirlcool]

We did our bedroom in a Pratt & Lambert Accoldade color called "Citrus Moon". It's a pale buttercream yellow type of color. Since the Accolade paint has a kind of luminescence to it (not a shine like semi gloss) the walls look teriffic. The ceiling painted flat white and the woodwork is painted gloss white. The room is really sunny in the morning and when the sun comes in the room looks very relaxing.

 

[arbilab]

A whole wall full of one color looks a lot more intense than a square inch of the same color. It bounces off itself and saturates. I can't tell you how to anticipate the amount by which this happens. It's probably not even a straight-line function, but logarithmic dependent upon what wavelengths are being absorbed. Oh, and what wavelengths you're starting out with.... daylight/fluorescent/incandescent/other.

 

[lordkenmore]

I haven't ever had a chance to choose colors since I've always been in a rental. The closest was a place I lived a few years ago. My-then roommate suggested that I repaint my bedroom. It was a nice idea, although I never got around to it. I was too overwhelmed with the choices, and I couldn't really imagine how small card samples would translate to an actual painted room. It also didn't help that I couldn't even decide day to day which sample card color I liked the most. I have a feeling, based on that experience, that choosing paint would not be an easy thing for me, and could end in disaster no matter how careful I am.

Some people seem to be better at this sort of thing than others. My mother seemed to be good at it. In all the years she painted and repainted, I only remember one total disaster wall that just didn't turn out as imagined. At the same time, she pulled off some ideas that seemed bad or downright insane. She chose one color for the dining room once that was, I thought, absolutely insane. I can't remember the color well enough now, but it was closest to orange (although darker, I think, than orange-orange.) In any case, I could not see how on earth that color would ever work. It went up, and I was surprised that it did work OK. It was OK during the day, but it was spectacular at night, particularly in winter when we ate by candlelight. (We did this nightly--it seemed classy, plus the lighting in that room was horrible.)

I like that idea above of hiring an interior decorator. It seems like it could save money and trouble in the long haul by getting it right the first time around.

 

[polkanut]

Our guest bedroom is a blue called "Sky".  It is a medium light blue color.  The computer room is almost a neon green called "Twig".  It really hits you at first, but after a little bit it grows on you.  The master bedroom color is called "Sheer", and it is a pinkish peach.  All of the other rooms are "Arizona White".

 

[westie2]

Jim

That happened to us one time only light blue.  The color on the card and even when mixed in the can looked just like whqt we wante (this was a bathroom) even going on it looked good.  Got it painted and had to do some running and when we came back and looked at the bathroom it almost knocked us backward!!! It was a Neon blue we called it nock you down blue.  Tried feathering theoom (white paint) and ended up putting up wall paper.

 

 

 

[jmm63]

Been living with the modified version of "hawthorne yellow" for two days and thought I liked it in the daylight, then thought I hated it with the lights on, then I just plain realized, I just don't love it and don't want to settle. So the new color is "lemon cream" and I got smart and bought a tester sample first. Now I can say I love it and can't wait to slap it on all the walls.

 

[whirlcool]

If you have CFL lights in the room that can change the wall color at night. Until we found the right kind of bulbs our Citrus Moon yellow walls turned wicked witch green at night!

 

[hoovermatic]

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!

This thread caught my eye because I am having just this problem with my kitchen in so far as I have had a new one fitted. It involved a lot of new plastering so first I have to apply two coats of thin emulsion, which is the easy bit. I am utterly bewildered by the array of colours out there!! My kitchen units are a high gloss white and I have had all the tiles removed and they are not going back because I hate tiles. I have been advised to use the kitchen paints because they are so tough and relatively waterproof. That has narrowed the colours down but it is still a nightmare trying to choose one and the thought of paiting it, hating it and then re-painting it fills me with dread :-(

In my music room, which I decorated last year, I decided to have a feature colour on one wall and wanted something restful so opted for something called 'Overtly Olive'. I painted that wall first and EVERYONE who saw it asked me why I had painted the wall battleship grey!! Only when I painted the OTHER walls did the actual olive colour appear, as if by magic. The same people thought I had listened to them and painted it a new colour. I love decorating - I find it very restful but the process of choosing colours is one of the small things in life that I dread!!

 

[whirlcool]

I'll be honest, I hate painting with a passion. It's messy, smelly and while I can be good at it, to get good results I am painfully slow.

Speaking of gray. We had a condo years ago that we wanted to paint the bathroom dove grey. It turned into a nightmare. All the grays we saw on color chips looked great, but we wanted a light to medium grey. The first one was so light after it dried that it looked like a dirty white. Then the next WAS battleship grey and too dark. We eventually got it right, but lots of painting and cussing.[this post was last edited: 2/21/2012-17:54]