Refresher: This was our living room when we first bought the house. Nearly every wall in our new home was this yellow/green that turned neon at night.
It made my eyes hurt. I swore it was giving me a twitch & migraines. Painting the main living area walls was on top of my to-do list. Unfortunately, I went about it the wrong way by picking colors that didn’t really mesh together & hurrying the process. I found a grey that I liked for the dining room (Coventry Grey by Benjamin Moore) & then found a grey that I liked for the hall (Revere Pewter by Benjamin Moore). Except those two don’t really mesh well – Coventry Grey has blue undertones, Revere Pewter has warm undertones. Both gorgeous colors, just not right together. I wanted an olive green in the living room to go with the olive velvet I found for drapes, but after about 20 paint swatches I called it a day & randomly picked one.
That ended up being celery:
Green is a hard color, folks. I found that most greens are either too yellow or too blue, too dark or too light. It gets funky in natural light versus artificial light. When it comes to green, sometimes you have to toss all 20 swatches out, close your eyes, & gamble.
It’s not that this color is even bad, per say. It’s actually a very lovely shade of green & I enjoy this room a lot. It seems to be the room that I gravitate to for reading & at my Christmas party, it was the room where we all piled in on top of each other. Which tells me that it’s a very comfortable-feeling room & I like that.
But it ain’t flowing quite right. & these three colors together? Not so good.
In hindsight, I should have picked my hall color first, painted those walls, & then waited to see how it all felt. Add one layer at a time versus rushing to get it all done quickly. I should have found drapes & pillows first, then picked the paint for the living room. Because the result of picking all the paint at once & then scrambling to find accessories led to the Great Curtain Dramz of 2012.
The good news is that I adore the Revere Pewter in the hall the most (which is good because with 25-foot ceilings or whatnot, it’s not getting repainted as easily as the other rooms). Then two weeks ago, I had this crazy urge to add more color, so I bought an orange & white geometric pillow & yellow & white geometric pillow for the couch. Then I snagged some yellow tulips & the room seemed to feel more alive. I realized that I wanted color in a smarter way.
I stumbled across this picture on Pinterest & fell in love with the grey & yellow & mixture of brown & black accents:
It would be an easy fix to achieve this look. Revere Pewter over the green walls, add yellow curtains.
I’d even pinned this months ago from Bower Power & I guess I didn’t realize how much I liked the combo:
The long-sought Pier 1 drapes that are currently in the living room aren’t going anywhere – they’ll be moving to the family room. The folks behind us chopped down EVERYTHING in their backyard, which means they can now see us in our skivvies on Saturday morning. Doug’s been pestering me about getting blinds & we know those gorgeous windows in the family room are going to be hot! hot! HOT! when the summer sun starts pouring in, so fixing window treatments in the back has moved up on the house to-do list.
I think this might be this weekend’s project, although it feels a little crazy to be painting a room just 5 months after we had it painted. But lesson learned (which is why I won’t be repainting the dining room until I settle into the new living room scheme!).
Have you ever done this? Made a quick decorating decision to just get it done, then immediately regretted it? Talk me through this, people.
