Painting's a pain

Since we were getting someone to paint the outside of the house this summer, and because we have some water damage in a few rooms indoors, we decided to go ahead and get the same company to fix up a few spots inside too. Picking a color for the kitchen walls has been a major pain.

Here is how it looks now with the original white walls. The granite is new as of this summer; we changed up the knobs (originally brass) to coordinate better with the counters.

The paint guru at the hardware store was enthusiastic, for some reason, about a sort of drab greyish pink color which was about as attractive as that description sounds. We ruled out that color - and nearly everything else for various other reasons - and ultimately arrived at gray.

But even when you narrow it down to gray, you have to pick exactly which shade and value you want (one for above the chair rail, one for below), and Benjamin Moore has so many that a person can get a little lost.

Over a few visits to the hardware store, we picked up a bouquet of paint chips in just about every shade of gray they had. We've finally played with them enough over the past few days to narrow down the combinations to two:

1) Bunny Gray above the chair rail; Pike's Peak Gray below.

2) Sterling above the chair rail; Adagio below

(You can view them here)

DH has gone to get some quarts so we can see how these really work together in real life on our real life walls. Eep. The moment of truth!