Re: Evangeline, MLI style

Which pumpkin are you looking at? Are you getting hooked by the pumpkin-y names and overlooking a good browny orange? Or maybe the manufacturer you're looking at doesn't have good colors in that range? If you've got an example of what you'd like, many paint shops can custom make the color you want.

Best wishes, Ericka

Ericka Kammerer wrote: With the sorts of colors you're talking

LOL it does sort of look like a crayola box threw up in my house (thanks to the artists who lived here before me). In an odd way, I think that's part of what attracted me to the house in the first place. I was soo tired of looking at houses with beige/white walls. Even though the color was wayyy over done here it was still color. Thanks for the "hue lesson". I like the Benjamin Moore play-with-paint thingy a bit better, it seems to pair things up in a way that makes more sense to me. You hit it right on the head Ericka, I am most definitely a "complex color" person (except for the bathroom, I want to paint it this pastel beach glass blue-green) and my eye tends to go to muted colors right off the bat. Most of my furniture and accessories are muted autumnal colors or basic black, I guess because that is what naturally appeals to me. I need to decide on a color for my hallway and maybe let that dictate the rest of my house. It's intimidating though because my hallway is sort of like the one you see in that picture. The front door opens up onto it and it's a very large, very wide central hall that runs the length of the house. Whatever color I choose, I better love because it will definitely be a prescence in my house.

Thanks again for the lesson! I love that saddle brown and firey opal!

No, really I'm not. I do love those colors a lot, I know I'm a little strange that way, but my eye has gone to those shades my whole life. I guess it's because I'm such an "autumn" person to begin with. I tend to pick up a lot cross stitch patterns that have those colors in it too- usually autumn themed.

Thanks! I think maybe the reason why I decided to leave them down is that having Halloween stuff up all year long made Halloween a bit less special. I still really like them though and want to display them, but maybe not in a place where I will see them all the time (like the kitchen).

LOL that sounds almost like a euphemism for uh, something else. Maybe my mind is just in a naughty place today?

I do have a lot of "autumn" fabrics that I've picked up at the quilt store just because I thought they looked pretty. I'll have to have hubby make them into cushions (I actually can't sew).

I did get hooked by the pumpkin-y names at first, but I tried lots of different shades of "browned" pumpkins at the Behr site and never quite found the one that I had in my mind's eye. The "gold rush" color on the Benjamin Moore site is close to what I have in mind. I wonder if I could achieve the color I want by using a lighter orangish tone and then doing a paint effect on top of it with a brown glaze? That might help to hide the many flaws on my wall as well..

If you like "gold rush," it's a very warm, brown/yellow orange. So, you'd need a warm purple to go with it, like "bottle of bordeaux." A green might be "webster green." A deeper brown might be "hasbrouck brown." You can muck around with faux finishes, and it will tone things down, but I confess I'm getting a little jaded with faux finishes for the most part. Maybe I'm alone on that, though ;-)

Best wishes, Ericka

Yeah, those are some nice colors, aren't they? If you've got an idea of a color palette you like, choose the most neutral for the hallway because it tends to touch on all your other rooms, and that way it can ease the transition among them. On the other hand, don't get too hung up on it. Even with colors you love, you don't stick with them forever. Colors go in and out and eventually start looking dated, so you're going to be changing them ;-) It's only paint! The only tricky bit with darker colors is that it's a little more effort to cover them up, especially if you're going to a lighter color. But, a really good primer and high quality paints are your friends ;-)

Best wishes, Ericka

I love burnt pumpkin and so much that when I bought my raw wood wall unit I used Ralph Lauren orange (more a burnt orange) and it was still too bright. So, what I did was I bought a gallon can of the crackle and a quart of water based polycoat and when I brushed the water based polycoat on the crackle medium it gave cracks as if the piece was old and on top of that I used a dark walnut stain to tone the color down and pool in the cracks to make the piece look a little weathered.

My point is, sometimes we have to play around with colors. You can pick the pumpkin you like and use a rag rolled brown glaze to tone it down. There are many techniques if you don't like the rag look.

Actually, I am also an autum. Everything in my house has earth tones, each room is painted a different color. Paint is cheap, so mistakes are easily worked out.

Yep, I think I'm gonna have to try the brown glaze approach anyway, because my walls are in kinda bad shape and that sort of finishing hides flaws.

And boy am I thankful for that. Last summer we painted the living room pale pink with a paler pink sponged over. DH's study is what I call Easter Egg purple. Both of these colors were the second palest ones on their cards. So for my study, I went with "Jet Stream" blue and the dining room is a palish green. Well that dining room just GLOWED. DH called it radioactive. We picked another green with just a touch more grey in it and had the painters come back. Cost an extra $200, but oh my! What a difference. And all the rooms seem to live nicely with each other now.

And yes, it would have been much cheaper to do the whole thing ourselves, but it took us 6 months to get through prepping and painting two rooms and it took the painter guys a week to prep and paint 3 rooms. Money well spent in this household.

Elizabeth

Now if I can only convince DH that we really do need to repaint and that, more importantly, color is a good thing. I may just tackle the downstairs bathroom myself. I'd do the entry way but it just a stuff and crap magnet. Along with the ancient stereo equipment and some trains, it is now the hockey gear room.

Cheryl

I wish I had've thought of that (hiring the painter :) We purchased a 29 yr old home in early September. Our walls took at least 2 coats of primer, and at least 2 coats (most of them took 3) of paint. Not a fun process! Our back entryway needs to be redone- the Melon yellow color I was looking for turned out post-it note yellow! We did have a few guys helping for a week but they definitely weren't professional painters!

As for color - LOVE IT :) Our living room is a darker greenish color, with the fireplace wall having vertical stripes in a lighter shade of the green (almost grey). That looks neat :) Our bedroom is called 'cotton duck' which is a chocolate brown color (new beigy carpeting). The computer room is called "Ballroom blue" which I took from the skanky 29 yr old carpet. It actually looks nice.

A few people think our house is 'dark' but I figure, I picked them, I like them - so that's all that matters :) Plus as Jangchub mentioned, paint is cheap (well relatively :) enough that if a mistake is made, it can be corrected.

Now...if all of those imperfections in the walls could be fixed without ripping out all the sheet rock. *sigh* That is the next master plan in 5 years when we tackle the kitchen...

Sarah

Either learn to skim coat or have it professionally done. We took wallpaper off of 100 year old horsehair plaster and instead of ripping it out, skim coated all of it. Heh. You can tell where DH started in the apartment, but by the time he got to our floor, he was pretty good at it. The painter guys did a phenomenal job of it, once the light was right for them to see.

Elizabeth

The restoration folks are trying to convince us that we want offwhite walls & ceilings in each and every room of the house when they are done.

That is SO not going to happen, I'll buy them the paint myself, but I'll be damned if they just take a sprayer and coat my house in offwhite!

Caryn