Fifty shades of grey

Ha! I love it when a cultural reference can be worked into a title. This one bearing the name of the much buzzed about book of the same name. Have you read it? I have. It's not for children though, so please keep them away from this book. Unless you want to explain a few things. Things that most likely you can't even answer yourself. It starts out pretty dark and twisty. I picked it up after reading some articles about how it totally goes against the women's movement. I also wanted to read it because the story started out as fan fiction. It's not the best writing and you can plainly see where she gets her material (i.e. Twlight and Pretty Woman, just to name a couple). But enough about books that may or may not have a bit too much ahem ahem. Let's talk paint.

I'm tired of everyday going and sitting in my taupe box I call an office. The color is the builder grade latex paint they slap everywhere that we didn't pay to have painted (i.e. the great room, dining room, and kitchen). It's not a good taupe. It's pretty dark as far as taupes go. If I had to give it a name, I'd call it Uglier Than a Dry Desert with No Water in Sight. I'm pretty sure that's the only way you'd like this color. If you had been trekking through the desert, thirsty, hot, tired, and even hallucinating. Got that?

The gray (I opt for this spelling of the color) craze has taken over and I'm going to jump on the bandwagon. This weekend I went to Home Depot to grab some swatches and a paint sample. After looking at the sample for a while, I decided to go with Behr's Sterling. When I compared it to other colors, it seemed light and airy, almost silvery. The other shades seemed too dark.

Early part of the day

Later part of the day

But that's the thing about picking a color underneath commercial-grade lighting—your light colors are going to seem darker than they really are and the dark colors way darker than they actually appear. Good thing there are paint samples.

Taupe and Sterling in action. See the blueish white I was talking about?

Yesterday I quickly slapped some squares all over the walls in my office. I usually paint a square or so on each wall to see how it plays with the light. When I opened the container, I knew I was in trouble. It looked like a blueish white paint, but I said to myself, "Jessaca, paint dries darker." So I went to lunch and then took stock.

My office apparently gets more natural blue light than I had realized, thereby washing out my silvery gray. It wasn't anywhere near the dramatic color I needed since I want to pair with with splashes of purples and yellows.

See the paint chip with the much darker color on the bottom? I'm going to get sample of that. I think it'll play nicely with natural light. It seemed really dark in the store, but now looking at it on the wall, it's the obvious choice.

Next I'm going to try the bottom right color. It's something like Porpoise. Not a very glamour name.