You Want What Color?

Quick update on the house projects:
We got the living room painted. Well, MOSTLY painted. I helped tape everything off, did trim work, and even managed to apply the second coat minus one of the walls, but Michael did most of the painting (because he's much better at it than I am, even though his painting lesson consisted of telling me it's no different than painting my nails....wrong).

Anyway- I LOVE the color. If you're interested, it's called Gobi Desert and it's a very warm, complimentary neutral. I think it will go fantastic with the trim and crown molding, and it looks great with the carpet. The only thing that didn't go over to well was the color we chose for the accent wall. We wanted one of the walls in the family room to be a little bit darker than the other three. So naturally, we selected a slighter darker color within the same color family as Gobi Desert. We even bought a tester and painted a swatch on the wall before buying the entire gallon. After evaluating the test swatch, we were certain it was going to look great.

Saturday night we primed all the walls and applied the first coat of the Gobi Desert on everything but the accent wall. Sunday we painted our accent wall Harvest Brown. And let me tell you, it looked horrible. I didn't like it immediately, but Michael encouraged me to wait for it to dry before jumping to conclusions. So we did. And I still hated it after it dried. Michael hated it too. In fact, he compared it to what you might find in a baby's diaper. And although disgusting, I think Michael's descriptive way of putting it gives you a fairly accurate visual of what our ASSent, uh I mean accent wall looked like :)

After getting the other three walls perfect, it was totally disappointing to having primed and painted this wall to have it end up looking crappy (pardon the pun), but that's life when it comes to paint. Trial and error right?

So, we decided on a color that we were 100% certain we would like (we knew we liked it because it is the same accent color that is painted in our living room and the previous owners had left us a paint can of it in the basement). Michael grabbed the lid with the color info on it, and we were off to Home Depot to get our gallon of Kodiak Gray. You'd think our paint problems were solved right? Wrong. Apparently, the color we had was so old that the line of paint no longer had the base color we needed to create the exact color. 2 hours and 4 different test gallons later (Home Depot is great because they didn't charge us for any of the test gallons it took during the attempt to reach our original color) we went home with a color that is as close as we're going to get to the original color.

Because we had painted the wall, it again had to be primed so Michael took care of that. Therefore, tonight is the big night we break out all the paint supplies and try this a second time. I really hope second time is the charm in this case, because if I've learned anything this weekend, it's that painting sux. Too much prep work, too much clean up time, and the house smells of....well, wet paint lol!

UPDATE: The first coat of paint looks awesome! I am hopeful the second coat (to be applied this evening) will finish off the room. I have no doubts :) Thank goodness for finding the right color!