This entire post is sort of a long stream of consciousness, so hopefully it is not too hard to follow along!
Let’s discuss how angry I am that Valspar seems to have trashed the Seaside Retreat line (also known as: half the paint colors in our house, my go-to source for picking new paint colors, and the line containing the color we were thinking about using for the exterior before we had to demo a bathroom). You can still buy the fan deck from the Lowe’s website (and if anyone tries to write on mine like the do with swatches… I will hurt them), but the line is not on Valspar’s site anymore and the swatches are gone from my Lowe’s. I’m assuming the color codes are still in the computer and I know that you can have them match anything, but I also know what they say about assuming.
from the little things
The whole thing with Seaside Retreat getting trashed (and seeing the picture above) made me start thinking about the colors we used in our house. In truth, that made me start panicking about that fact that I might not have the swatch for all of our paint colors. Which led me to put together this little graphic below with all of our paint colors (I left out the colors we painted furniture).
You’ll notice that Summer Sorbet doesn’t have the guest bath listed beneath it. This is not because I’m still in mourning over the loss of my falling-apart-but-I-pretended-it-was-pretty bathroom or because I’m in panic mode about that whole thing ever getting finished (though I kind of am). I we might still going to go with Summer Sorbet (or whatever chip looks close) when we do have walls again, but I remembered that we bought a gallon of Valspar’s Under the Sea a while back when planning to do the laundry room, so we could just have that reshaken and use it. It’s a smidgen darker, but with white subway tile (and maybe a bigger window, who knows what we’ll do) it could work.
Thankfully, seeing the colors all together like this actually makes me feel a bit better about how they flow from one room to the next. Sometimes the master and the art room colors bother me. And the floor plan I made a while back didn’t really help with representing things accurately (I tried to make the colors a bit less vibrant so that you could read the room names better and it just didn’t work well). I need to try (yet again) to make a floor plan with floorplanner.com, but that site makes me want to rip my hair out. Maybe I’ll sketch one out tonight, scan it, and color it in Photoshop. I’m hoping for an adorably imperfect, hand-drawn look, but we’ll see how that works out for me.
But back to paint colors. A year and a half into living in out house we still have two rooms left to paint: the fourth bedroom (which is home to dog kennels and a closet full of Robert’s clothes at the moment) and the laundry room. Below is a general idea of the colors I’ve been liking lately (not that we’re planning to do anything soon, we’ve got too much else going on).
The top row is similar to what I’d like to use for the laundry room (Clothesline Fresh is ironically my favorite; and similar to Under the Sea), and the bottom row has ideas of what I’d like to use for the fourth bedroom & the back porch. There are even some days when I think that I would love to use something as “dark” (for me) as Lyndhurst Gallery Beige in the living room. Then I start second guessing myself, thinking that using something that dark with such small windows is maybe not a good idea, maybe something like Upper Eastside or Portland would work better? (PS – in my fantasy the living room has a chevron rug and bright yellow curtains like the room below – unless I go chevron in the art room, then who knows).
from here
I also have daydreams about painting the current guest room, which one day will be the master when the carpet is gone (and the bathroom is complete). In those daydreams I think that something like Upper Eastside would be a good choice for the “new” master. But then I start thinking about how current master would become the new guest room and I try to think about colors for that, too. Which leads to trying to decide if we should leave the beds where they are because I don’t want the headboard of our bed to go in front of the window in the other room. And worrying about “flow” and curtains and rugs and…
Does all this daydreaming make you tired? Just the thought of moving all that furniture around makes me feel tired, sore and a broke. I know that if we were to make any changes to our current colors it would definitely be good to dot it at a time when we’re moving things around anyhow, because cleared rooms are easier to paint. Which makes me think that whenever the rooms are cleared for the hardwood might be a good time to think about painting. But we have to get through the guest bathroom before we can do anything.
Whew! Did you follow any of that? Getting back into panic-mode now…
from 
smile from 
our once-upon-a-time jacuzzi tub (no, we didn’t convert it)
