I’m one of those people who can be very creative if I have firm boundaries. It’s probably why I’m in love with HGTVs Get Color and Find Your Style. Or I’m in love with Matt the handyman and Karen McAloon’s hair color.

When we bought our house, it was mostly builders flat finish beige, with a sick inducing green in a guest room, and another shade of sick inducing green in the master bath – that didn’t match the yellow/maize color in the master bedroom. The downstairs powder room? Cranberry with gold accents.

We knew we were going to pain the entire house, I just needed to get me some parameters. Just like FYS, I knew I needed to restrict my colors so I would know what I was working with.

Enter Sherwin Williams. I picked the Arts and Crafts palette and planned around that. The bonus of doing it this way is that I know that generally speaking the entire house flows well. I don’t have any color clashes, like two different colors of green that don’t match a yellow. I’ve also been able to use leftover wall paint to work on some furniture – still with the same assurance that thing will go together. As a bonus, since all my paint colors are on one card, I can carry it with me when I’m looking for fabrics or furniture for the house – and one card is way easier than a bunch of paint strips.

As much as I wanted to be anti white in the house, I’m completely infatuated with this color – White Hyacinth.

I put this in 2 bedrooms and the slightly darker Indian White in the hallway that wraps downstairs. They have a yellow tint so they are bright and keep the dark corners from being so dark.

Speaking of yellow, my mom and I are into the yellow kitchen. She prefers more of the lemonade and I prefer for less of a school bus look, so Hubbard Squash worked for me.

Went an entirely different way with the master suite (hm. that sounds pretentious) and went for Studio Blue Green and a gray.

I put a red in the dining room and as an accent in the kitchen and living room – but they didn’t have a decent sized paint chip online for me to be able to show you.

The only color I’m still not sure of, even a year later, is this one – Ruskin Room Green

it’s in the office and the powder room and I’m still not convinced it’s not a shade of baby poop green. On the upside, when I split it half and half with some White Hyacinth, I loved the color and used it on the shelves in Comfed Out Kaiser headquarters.

Deep question of the day – what’s more interesting – reading about paint colors or watching paint dry? 🙂