paint failure

who knew picking paint would be so complicated???

as soon as my husband and i decided to purchase my grandparents home, blogs have become my new late night read.  i love following along as others also go through their own home renovation or even room updates.  i steal so many great ideas.  when it came time to decide on paint, a large part of my decision came from blogs that i follow.  

as a case and point, i follow joan of for the love of a house.  her home is to die for!  i just love her style and she very graciously shares all of her sources.  this is a picture of her kitchen:

for the love of a home

see what i mean?!?  love it!

she used benjamin moore white dove for her cabinets, ceiling and trim and benjamin moore gray owl on the walls.  "perfect!", i thought.  i'll get a sample of each.  and i did, along with a few more that got some good reviews in blogland.  as mentioned before, i go to the local ace hardware for paint samples and they carry benjamin moore.  so all my paint samples are from benjamin moore with the exception of "ash" on the far left.  it is from renovation hardware and i loved the way it looked here.

going back to the benjamin moore white dove, several of my inspiration pictures that i have pinned use white dove.  i was certain that white dove would be my trim and ceiling color.  so certain i told my contractor to go ahead and get it for the ceilings.  big mistake.  keep reading.

so here is what happened when i started sampling colors...

this is an iPhone pic so the colors are distorted some.

we first put up the potential wall colors; classic gray, shoreline, gray owl and ash.  jeff and i both agreed we liked the classic gray the best.  he insisted that the gray owl had too much blue in it and thought that shoreline was too dark for the look we wanted.

ok.  gray owl it is.  

but to be certain, lets just test that white dove that i JUST ordered 10 gallons of.  

*gulp*

i hate it.

if i were to use white dove on my trim and ceilings, they would be darker than my gray owl walls...  jeff quickly got the other two whites we tested on the exterior of our house and we sampled those.  we both agreed to use the same china white as we used on our exterior for our ceilings and trim too.  

now i'm super eager to get everything painted so i rest easy knowing i made the right decision.

~becky