Vee+Dee at Home: Killing the Orange

When we moved in, we knew the orange in the living room had to go. I know orange can work if you do the decor right, but it's not us. In the overused words of romantic comedies, "Sorry orange, it's not you, really, it's us." But I like Godfather more than Sleepless in Seattle, so, "It's nothing personal, orange. It's just business...BANG!"

We wanted a neutral color, but weren't fussy about which neutral color. So, like the amateurs that we are, we marched to the mistint section in the Benjamin Moore store and chose a color, any color, that looked tame.

See? The definition of tame.

I said to the lady working at Benjamin Moore that it seemed like a nice color and she had this funny expression like she wanted to say something but felt like she shouldn't. That should have been our clue.

Vee finished up putting primer on the last section of the wall, while I started cutting in on one wall. The first stroke scared me because the paint in the can was totally a case of false advertising — there was no way it was that same tame color! But I told myself how the color in our bedroom (which we thought and thought and thought about for weeks before making a decision) seemed scary at first, but worked in the end.

No amount of talking to myself could convince me, though. So I decided to paint a big section to see what it really looked like. Behold:

Definitely not tame. It was closer to orange than we would have liked. And it looked like mud.

So we looked at some paint samples we had at home and decided on a greige color: either Benjamin Moore's Edgecomb Gray or Revere Pewter. They were next to each other on the paint chip and were pretty similar. But Edgecomb Gray had more beige in it, while Revere Pewter had more gray in it.

From left to right: Lancaster Whitewash, Edgecomb Gray, Revere Pewter.

I was already leaning toward Edgecomb Gray because I didn't want anything too cool here in cold Canada. And then I saw that Annie from Bossy Color had this to say about Edgecomb Gray: "an extremely subtle gray, a lovely, muted gray, a gray so complex and sophisticated that it fluctuates between cool and warm." And I was sold.

We went to Home Depot and matched to paint to Behr interior paint to keep costs down. Then got to work pronto. I learned an important lesson on how paint never looks the same in its liquid state in a container and in its dry state on the wall. Just look at this:

Right after we finished painting, I was relieved that the orange was gone (I actually chanted, "Die, orange, DIE!" as I painted.) But I wasn't sure about the color. I mean, I was still in shock over the horrible mistint paint. Can anyone blame me?

And our light bulbs cast a blue glow on the walls in the living room. It looked better in the kitchen, where the lights were less blue. Look how different the color looked in the kitchen and in the living room at night. Vee tried to convince me that it was just the lighting, but I was already considering repainting.