Singing the Blues

Hello everyone! I'm back to blogging after a very busy weekend.  My hubby graduated med school Saturday and we had a wonderful graduation party for him at his dad's house.  Sunday we celebrated my birthday with my parents who were in town from Illinois.  We also got to show them the house for the first time which was a lot of fun.  I think they loved it!

Today we got back to real life after we had a goodbye lunch with my parents.  Ben and I headed to the Sherwin Williams store to pick out paint colors for our living room.  We are hiring a professional painter to paint all the wainscoting and trim white, and since they're already going to be there we're having them paint the top half of the living rooms walls as well. 

I'm sure everyone who has painted a room will tell you this too, but picking out paint colors is hard! Especially white...who knew there were 30 shades of white to choose from? We asked the salesman his advice and he said Dover White and Alabaster are both very popular so I think we're going with one of those.

Then it was time to choose a color for the top half.  I've lived it beige and boring apartments for the last four years so I'm ready for some color baby!  Naturally since blue is my favorite color that's what I chose.  Ben told our painter this the other day and he said blue would clash with the carpet, which I think is ridiculous. He suggested that instead of blue we should choose a shade of espresso because that's what they're doing in a lot of high end homes now.  Sorry Charlie, that is too boring for my taste.  Go big or go home right? I had a good idea in mind of the blue I wanted for but of course it was still hard to choose an exact color.  I narrowed it down to three:  Briny, Freshwater, and Jamaica Bay.  They whipped up three sample-sized quarts for us and we took them back to the house so we could try them out.  Ben and I both got into the painting action.

 

Here's what the wall looked like after we got the three colors up (the letter underneath is the first letter of the paint color).

I like the freshwater but it's a little light.  Jamaica Bay is pretty too but not quite right.  At this point I'm liking Briny the best.  However, after we had given it a little bit of time to dry it was looking really teal.  Not what I am going for.  So, it was back to Sherwin Williams to pick up sample number four, Cruising.  It's the same hue as Jamaica Bay but one step darker.  Ben painted that on the wall for me to check out.

 

  

And here's what all four of the paint samples look like together:

I still don't know.  Cruising is darker than Jamaica Bay, which I like, but I'm not sold on it.  Is it too blue?  This is so difficult, because on the paint chips the colors look completely different, see?

I even went back onto Sherwin Williams' Paint Visualizer and "painted" a photo of the living room with each of the different blues.  They look totally different online too.

Briny

Cruising

Freshwater

Jamaica Bay

Do you see why this is so difficult? We're going to let the paint dry until Wednesday and at that point we'll choose a favorite.  I'm just really nervous because we're paying a painter a lot of money to put this up for us and if we don't like it we'll have wasted a good amount of money.  This is also all getting done while we're in Europe so it's not like we can just do one wall and see what we think.  It's all or nothing.  Any feedback is welcome because I am stuck!