Livingroom Makeover

Welcome back to our paintover journey! ​Just a reminder of the room colors before we dive into the new paint colors we picked...

As you can see in the before pictures, the dining room is a light yellow and the living room a darker peach.  The sun rises on the front side of our house so we don't get as much light through the picture window as we'd like.  The darker peach sort of swallows up the room in our opinion so we decided some light grays were the way to go! We went through about five options.  We wanted a light gray around most of the living room and a dark gray on the fireplace wall as an accent.  In the dining room we would use those same living room grays - light gray above the chair rail and dark gray below.  This way we'd have continuity with our open floor plan. 

We decided to go with Valspar paint because of their "love your color guarantee" which entails "complimentary replacement color to anyone who does not absolutely love their first color choice".  We thought that sounded like a pretty good guarantee, plus we liked that we could explore the colors online here. At first started off looking at their grays at Lowes and found two we really liked! We bought a sample of each and using Lowe's sample paint kit, we painted the removable decals and moved them around the room to get a feel for how the light would affect the color in each area. Boy am I glad we did that because it turns out the two grays we had picked were way too blue in certain lights.  Below are pictures of the exact same painted decals in different lighting. Scary right?

After doing more research into gray paint, I learned about the different undertones - blue, red, purple and yellow.  It was obvious to me then that even though Andrew and I had naturally gravitated towards the blue-gray, what we really needed was a yellow-gray.  That may sound a little odd but it mostly just looks like a beige-gray which creates a stunning neutral.
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Helpful resources on gray paint:
http://theturquoisehome.com/picking-perfect-gray-paint/
http://mysoulfulhome.com/two-true-gray-paint-colors/

After some quick decision making, we grabbed a few samples of yellow-gray two days before we were set to paint and finally decided on Tempered Gray and Soulful Grey.  I was surprised and nervous that these two were not suggested palette mates on the Valspar color explore website, but we decided to push on in hopes that these two would ultimately work together.

Low and behold the two colors work together perfectly!  The contrast with the white ceiling and the white trim is what really makes it.

We are so in love with our new living room and dining room. Can't wait to buy a new couch, rug and curtains this memorial day and start tying all of our colors together!