Kitchen Colors

After seven weeks I finished the cabinets.

My friend Cindy came over for dinner and helped me hang the last of the doors - specifically the ones that were too heavy for me to hold in place and screw in at the same time.

After that I thought I would take a break before deciding on a color for the walls.

Yeah, that lasted two days.  I ended up getting samples from Lowe's and Home Depot, depending which I was nearest at the time.  One fun discovery was that both stores can look up and give you colors from other places.  I had brought in a paint chip from Sherwin Williams, after I found out Sherwin Williams paint runs $70 a gallon and yeah, that's not gonna happen.  I handed it to the girl at the Lowe's paint counter and asked her to color match it, assuming she would hold it up to the little color scanner like they do with stuffed toys in the commercials or with a chip of paint from the outside of my house when I had to do some touchups on the front.

After perusing doorknobs and shelf brackets because owning a home has made me a boring, stereotypical Saturday morning DIYer as cloyingly portrayed in sunlit HGTV clips, I went back to the paint counter.  The girl was examining the paint dot on the top of the sample.  "This looks like it," she said.  "I found it on the computer." At my puzzled look she said, "Oh, we can look up other company's colors." "Really?" I said.  "I thought I was cheating but apparently it's legit!" 

So I used that to my advantage and got two more expensive brand colors in big box brand paint.

Current frontrunner is Benjamin Moore's Everlasting (1038).  Funny, because it was the first one I picked before getting distracted by Sherwin Williams "Interactive Cream".  Interactive Cream was too dark, and orangey, so I also tested Sherwin Williams Biscuit.  That was too close to flesh tone, and once I realized it reminded me of the color of what's stuck under your fingernail when you scratch a lot it was never going to happen.  I also think the Behr sample was closer to paint chip than the Valspar samples, so maybe Home Depot's color matching works better or Valspar's new oval sample cans don't mix as well.  I could see streaks of white or green unmixed in the Valspar samples, so those colors might not be exactly true.

Now that this is my kitchen wall I'm kind of committed.  Maybe that's something I can do over Labor Day.  Compared to painting the kitchen cabinet it will be ludicrously easy!