Paint Colors

I have come to the conclusion that we are very bad at picking paint colors. I mean, we know what we are looking for and can picture it in our heads, but when it comes to picking the correct color from millions of little swatches, we are very, very bad. As I type this I am doing what I have dubbed the '5-minute test.' You paint a bit of the wall your chosen color and then walk away for 5 minutes. Then you go back and see what your reaction is to the color. I have finally learned this after painting three other rooms in our house the wrong shade of our intended color. If you just stay in the room and keep painting, you loose your vision of what you want and get caught up in painting. That is how we ended up with a bathroom a color we affectionately refer to as Home Depot Orange.

The day after we painted the whole room (two coats!) Home Depot Orange we went back to Home Depot to get the lighter shade we intended for the room to be in the first place. The same thing happened with the pale blue in Noah's room, and the blue-gray of our bathroom. We painted the entire stinkin' room before figuring out it was the wrong color. We did manage to get our bedroom right on the first try. It is hard to mess up beige. Now I am going to head back into the kitchen and hope that the tiny bit of wall I painted in the color we chose is the lovely pale, sunshiny shade of yellow that I am picturing in my head.

Update: Didn't like it. Way too bright. Sigh.