Color Wheel
Okay, I'm over the primed vs. tint debacle. Putting color on the walls, however, is starting to make my head spin. Part of it is still the strong desire to get this work done so that we can move into the space. But there's also a kind of madness that can take over when it comes to trying to choose colors for your walls. Interior designers and color theorists have banked on that madness for years.
Two years ago, when we were just getting ready to move into the downstairs, we went about choosing colors in hopes we could get the rooms painted before move day. Well we didn't get the rooms painted but we did set on three colors based on a palette provided by a Benjamin Moore brochure. The only color we were able to get on the wall before moving in was "cream yellow" in the kitchen.
A few days ago I started putting "secret garden" on the wall of the master bedroom. My first thought was, "What the hell were we thinking?" The color that I remembered as a soft pastel red was looking decidedly hot pink on the wall. I immediately started to think disaster had struck, I had wasted $70 odd dollars on paint, and I was never going to make the June 1st deadline. (Do I seem a little touchy about this deadline thing?)
Anyway, Benjamin Moore has a cool website that lets you see how some basic rooms would look in different colors including how washes and tints of one color might look over the base of another color. I plugged "secret garden" in as a base color and started trying out color washes of various darker reds. "Navajo red," "copper clay," "smoldering red," "the deadline is looming red," were all worthy options for toning down the hot pink "secret garden." We decided on "smoldering red" and rushed off to the paint store.
This time, I was going to be smart. I brought a couple of large scrap pieces of sheet rock upstairs, primed them and then applied a base coat of "secret garden" allowing a couple hours for the primer to dry.
While "secret garden" was heating up on the scrap sheet rock, I got to work painting the boy's room with the third color we had chosen two years ago when our tastes were questionable. With trepidation I popped open the can of "feather soft." Whew! A lovely soft, purplish blue peaked out at me. Somewhere between the color of lilacs and forget-me-nots with a dash of periwinkle and maybe a bit of... How do they come up with these colors? ...I happily started covering the walls of my son's room.
After finishing the first coat of "feather soft" in Ramon's room, I was ready to experiment with adding a wash of "smoldering red" over the base of "secret garden" that I put on one of the test boards. The other test board was only primed with white to see what a wash would look like over that.
The results gave me some hope. A wash of "smoldering red" over "secret garden" showed promise even if the names might lead one to think of a forest fire in a nudist colony. We decided to think about it for a day or two and meanwhile I've put down the base of "secret garden" on the rest of the walls in the master bedroom.
And now after seeing the master bedroom with one coat of "secret garden" throughout, I'm starting to have second thoughts about my second thoughts. Maybe I'm getting used to this hot pink. Maybe it's not so hot pink after all. It certainly is cheery. But will I be able to hang onto a bad mood in a room this color? Will my fellow biker gang members give me a hard time? Wait, I'm not in a biker gang. Maybe this could work. Is this the deadline talking? Can a man be a man in pink room? Maybe if I stock the bookcase with Norman Mailer novels...
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