Hill Country Hideout: 50 Shades of Gray

If you are new to the site and aren't familiar with our paint saga you can go back and read Paint: Root word PAIN, and Paint Part Deux! to catch-up. But don't feel obligated, you can spare yourself my poor writing and power on here.

As mentioned in the previous post the painters started the exterior. The Eider White is on the garage and front of the house and we love it. Once the aluminum garage and entry doors are installed, along with the silver exterior lights everything will pull together nicely. Our concerns that Eider would be blindingly bright were for naught, it is perfect.

Sherwin Williams Eider White

After a great deal of fussing and test painting we chose Grizzle Gray for the front and rear bump outs. And when we saw it on the house we knew...

The problem was it didn't look gray, or grizzly, at all. It looked green. Here it is on the house:

Fortunately, it was the holidays, and the weather took a cold turn, so it wasn't a problem to put the painters on hold while we scrambled to find an alternate color. But we were still quite shocked at the result. At first we thought perhaps the paint shop mixed the color incorrectly but as we held up color swatches and looked at more photos of Grizzly Gray online it looked correct. The green didn't really pop until it was in direct sunlight. In the shade it actually looked about right. Having white paint reflecting onto the gray also played a part in the outcome, but that didn't change our minds about changing the color. Roberta and I are both Michigan State grads and we joked about adding a large white block "S" to the bump-out and convert this to an MSU spirit house.

After all of that time spent painting test patches on the house, researching online, and fretting over shades of gray we still got it wrong. What could we possibly do to somehow correct our process? As we returned to the color pallets we realized there aren't any plain gray colors. Every gray is based on a brown, or blue, or green base family. What ever happened to just mixing white and black together in various concentrations to get Old School gray? The Sherwin Williams color consultant didn't have an

answer either. There was one gray color that the store said was discontinued called Westchester Gray. And low and behold it looked like a true black based grey. We added that to our list of candidates. By the way, a quick web search and we were convinced that this was not a discontinued color as it is Pottery Barns "Color of the Month" that very moment. Thanks Sherwin Williams... After considerable discussion in the store we bought a few variations of gray, and we also bought a barn red sample. What the heck - maybe the red would look good. At this point we were up for anything.

Roberta had some business to take care of with Addie and Gavin so Alex and I got to work painting entire sheets of poster board of each color. She is truly and artist as you can see here.

Then it was a trip out to the house to place these posters in various places on the house. In the sun, in the shade, against the white and green. In the front and back...