Picking the Perfect Shade of Gray

Happy Friday!

I hope you’ve had a great week and are gearing up for a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend.  Ours will include a “Mother’s Day Baseball Tournament”.  Let me just throw this out there to coaches – as much as I love watching my boys play baseball, please don’t schedule a tournament over Mother’s Day weekend as though it’s a “gift”.  We have enough games and practices every week that a tournament in our honor isn’t necessary.  Just sayin’.

If you follow me on Facebook, you saw that I put some samples of gray paint on the walls of my husband’s office, not realizing how, um, similar they all were to one another.  And this was after agonizing over a bajillion shades of gray – clearly I was delirious.

Top left – Dolphin
Top right – Secret
Bottom left – Chelsea Gray
Bottom right – Revere Pewter
(That little swatch in the middle is Graystone)

Kind of reminds you of that song, ‘Which one of these is not like the other….”

Then I put the same colors up against a backdrop of primer.  Big difference, yes?  Especially with the color that “doesn’t belong”.

The coloring might be a bit off, due to the light and the fact that I put the paint colors up on different walls, but you get the idea.  And at the end of the day, I wasn’t sold.  At first I was leaning toward Chelsea Gray, but then I was afraid it would be too dark with some of the other dark pieces that are in there (black desk, black credenza, etc…).

So what do I do?  I pick a color without even doing a sample swatch.  Yeah, I’m a risk taker like that.

I chose Cape May Cobblestone by Benjamin Moore.  I saw some lovely images on Kristin’s blog (and one of my favorite go-to sites for solving color quandries) Favorite Paint Colors. 

This gorgeous room is from Four Generations One Roof.  A stunner, right?

Mind you, I’m still patching walls from the wallpaper removal (I swear, I think drywalling them all over again would be an easier process), but I have two walls that are wallpaper-free, so I slapped the paint up there to see how it looked…

The jury is still out at this point, but it’s growing on me.  I just start to freak out when I think it starts to have any smidge of a purple undertone.  I swear, grays are harder than any other color I’ve chosen so far!  So tricky!

But, it does look better than this hot mess:

On the motivational front – I’m hosting my Bunco group next week, so I anticipate I’ll crack the whip and finish painting the entire room before then!  Nothing like a party to light the fire, right?

Do you have a favorite shade of gray?  Do share!

Have a beautiful Mother’s Day weekend!