you can’t judge a paint by its chip

After DIY decorating several rental apartments, I know this mantra well:  you can’t judge a paint by it’s chip.  But when I had to quickly decide on a few paint colors last week for our newly plastered walls, I got just plain cocky. Loathe to delay any aspect of our renovation, I hastily chose colors for a few of our rooms without buying sample cans and painting the requisite 4X4 squares directly onto the walls where the colors would live.

Renovation misadventure:  I chose prominent colors just off of the tiny paint chips and they are not quite right.  The barely blue living room is a tad too aqua and the icy lemon bathroom is a bit electric.

To be fair, I couldn’t paint my sample squares onto the freshly plastered, unprimed walls.  And the current lighting in our place consists of a few bare construction bulbs dangling in wire cages.  Another factor working against me was that flooring was neither installed nor stained, so color selection was a crapshoot anyway. Once lighting is installed and the wood floors are stained, I’ll surely be doing some diy painting (with liberal use of drop cloths and tape!).

My friend and fellow renovationista, Doris, had a brilliant solution to picking paints early in the game.  She bought sample cans of several potential shades and painted 2 coats of each onto large sheets of drawing paper.  When I visited her construction site, she was walking around with these huge samples, taping them to walls and watching how the light played over the colors throughout the day.  She’s very happy with the shades her contractor painted, and I’ll be happy with mine some day soon… until I get bored with my “perfect” shades and start the process all over again.  It’s only paint, after all.