All Aboard the Crazy Train

 How do you know when you've completely lost your marbles? Maybe when you find yourself hunkered over the kitchen counter, meticulously mixing two different colors of paint samples using your son's medicine droppers to ensure that you are using exactly the same amount of each color of paint*.

  At least that's how I knew I had crossed over into crazy this morning.

  So, here's what happened. I found out I was having a baby girl. I opened my brain and just doused it in Pinterest. I thought, "it would sure be nice if Cora had lovely, pale aqua walls" ... perhaps like this:

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Or this:

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  Now, a great thing about finding room inspiration online is that, often, the name of the wall color will be listed, so that (theoretically) you could just buy that color and be on your merry way. Yeah right. Back in the great living room paint debacle of 2009 I learned that just because you LOVE how a paint color looks in a picture, someone else's home, or on the walls of a store (say, Silver Sage in Restoration Hardware, for example), it does not mean that using the same paint will get you the same look on your own walls. I learned that lesson after our families helped us paint our entire living room, kitchen, and entry silver sage, only to discover the next morning that our home looked like a baby boy's nursery. Many paint samples and hours of work later, we finally nailed the look I was going for.

  So, I knew that the rooms in the pictures above are both painted in Benjamin Moore's Robin's Nest, but there was NO way I was going to go out and just buy that paint & hope for the best. Especially after seeing some pics taken from different angles in the rooms, or with different lighting, and realizing that color has the potential to look like this:

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 Still pretty, but just a smidge more intense than I'd like in one of our smallish bedrooms. So, I decided instead to just hit up our local Lowe's and Home Depot for paint chips and find one that would recreate the look of the first two pics. That's when the crazy started. In the pic below, there are 5 different paints tested out on the wall. The two furthest to the left are the first two I bought. They were both too blue-gray. So then I picked out the two colors on the right and tried them out. They were both too white (which is why you can barely see them). However, I was hung up on one of them - Bubble by Behr. It seemed like the look I was going for, just a tad too pale (and none of these colors are translating very well onto the screen from my iphone pic, but you get then general idea).  

  

  

Actually, the Bubble color on the wall was a far cry from the color on the paint chip, so today I took it back to the kind man at Home Depot (3rd visit this week) and showed him on a piece of paper what color Bubble had turned when it dried (we'll call this color Bubble #1). He said that it couldn't be right and tried mixing me another sample ... to make a really tedious story only slightly less so, I'll just say that another couple of tries later, he had finally concocted his own paint formula that looked very similar to the paint chip (this color I'll refer to as Bubble #2). I brought it home and painted it underneath Bubble #1.

  So, so close to what I'm looking for, but now instead of being too white, it was just a bit too intense. And that is was brought me to the point of playing paint apothecary on my kitchen counter. After inspecting the formulas listed on the top of my samples I realized that Bubble #1 & Bubble #2 were identical, except that the first one had only 1 part of a particular color, and the second one had 3 parts of that color. I thought that just maybe, if I mixed equal parts of the two samples, I'd end up with a color that was just right.

 And you know what? Bubble #3 is just right. It's the color wedged between the other two, with the paint chip taped next to it. I actually think my attempt at paint mixing got me a color closer to the paint chip than either the computer or the nice Home Depot man were able to achieve, but I couldn't have done it without their help.

 So, tomorrow I will go to Home Depot for the 4th time this week. I'll find Mr. Paint-Mixer and explain my formula to him and ask him to mix up a couple of gallons of it for me. And then I'll be committed ... possibly to a wall color, possibly to a mental institution. Either way, my husband will be glad the paint debate has been laid to rest. He likes to say that when I'm working on a project I like to aim for an incredibly small target. This is very true, and this post is proof that small targets can be hit, sometimes it just takes a whole slew of arrows before you get it right**.

*Don't worry, I threw away the medicine droppers I used for my paint mixing ... I'm not going to contaminate my son.

**I'm really banking on this color working, but so far I've only got about 4 inches x 8 inches of color on a wall from a paint I've mixed myself. Let's hope I don't have to write a sequel about how you really shouldn't make up your own paint formulas.

*** Final note: I know there are more important things in the world than paint colors ... like just about everything. Please don't judge.