The Perfect Gray - Facelift Series Part Three

Benjamin Moore - Stonington Gray HC-170

With allll the work that went into this bathroom remodel I can honestly say that the most challenging component was the paint. OH. MY. GOSH...As crazy as this may seem I am dead serious. Not only was the act of painting very time consuming but the selection process was actually painful.

Let me start from the beginning....

When this project began the walls were a shade of green somewhere between apple and lime. As I mentioned in my last post, the light fixture directed the color palette of the space and those green walls were just not going to work. I wanted the bathroom to be light and tranquil, so I knew I wanted a neutral earthy tone that would compliment the elements in the room - not fight them. The first color that popped into my mind was gray. Gray has been an intriguing color to me for sometime, in fact I had tried gray walls in a den and quickly found that picking the perfect gray was complicated.

In my first gray paint attempt a few years ago I used gray paint over a light yellow/beige existing wall color without priming. So, when the color came out light purple-ish my first thought was...I should of primed the walls (DUH).  So, I did. I primed the walls and then painted them AGAIN and AGAIN the color came out purple. This time I blamed a large red couch that was in the room thinking that maybe the red couch brought out the purple tones in the paint. So, I ended up going in a completely different direction and closed the door on gray paint all together...until recently...

This time, I was more seasoned, I've got this I thought. So, I primed the walls in the bathroom. I went to Ace Hardware and selected a light gray that I thought would be perfect and began the process of painting the walls. As I painted I realized this paint was turning out light purple too! AHHH! NOT AGAIN I thought. Always a little optimistic I thought maybe the paint would dry less purple so, when I went back to check on it the next day I was disappointed to see it was periwinkle-purple just as it was the night before. Blast! What to do?! I was not willing to give up on my gray walls this time so I began to research, and this is what I found...

There are a lot of grays out there and their undertones can be red, purple, blue, brown and green. When looking at a paint swatch look at the top color, if it has a lot of blue or purple tones than the light shades down from it will too. From everything I could find the best grays are those with brown tones. So, I went to Benjamin Moore and looked at paint swatches. Still not 100% sure of my paint picking abilities, I googled the names of those I liked to see what others had to say about them- this was really helpful, because a lot of people showed pictures of their rooms painted in certain colors. After a few days I had decided on the color you see at the top - Benjamin Moore's Stonington Gray HC-170 AND it is perfect! THANK GOODNESS!

Please share any experiences you all have had with paint colors. We can all use all the help we can get with some of these tricky colors!

Stay tuned, with the paint on the walls we are getting closer to the final reveal!