Picking Our Interior Paint Colors

When it came to picking our interior paint colors, I knew I wanted to keep a clean, bright interior. So many of the fun and custom touches we’ll be adding to the house will come over time, and not knowing exactly what we’ll want to do down the road, I wanted to give the house a blank slate that would encourage some creativity.

As you might know, picking interior paint colors can be tricky. I’ve learned over time, through trial and error, that nearly every single paint color looks different in different lighting. Depending on how much natural or artificial light a room has, will change (or highlight) the undertone of the paint color. I have my tried and true colors that I tend to turn to time and time again, but there are also colors that I’ve liked in certain spaces, that just don’t translate well in other rooms. 

If you’re painting an entire interior, it honestly pays (in time and money) to get a few different samples and paint them on the wall in several rooms throughout the house. In the case of this house, I had a few different colors I was considering, and as soon as I saw how they translated throughout the house in different lighting, I was able to narrow down and eliminate the ones that just weren’t working. 

We gave ourselves plenty of time to see the colors in real life before picking and moving forward with painting. I wanted to make sure we had time to see the colors at different times during the day, in cloudy weather and in full sun. It really does make a huge difference, and often times, the undertone of the color will come through when the lighting isn’t ideal. 

Taking the time, and picking the color in the exact space the paint will be going is key… the proof is in the walls! Below, I’ve listed each color we have on the wall…

Here are the colors we were sampling:

• -Jogging Path by Sherwin Williams (leftover from when we were testing paint for the exterior, but still a great color)
• -Classic Gray by Benjamin Moore
• -Gray Mist by Benjamin Moore
• -Natural Cream by Benjamin Moore

I’ve used Classic Gray before in the fixer upper my mom and I sold. It was a great color and I was anxious to see how it would look in this house, but as soon as it dried, it look a little purple… We definitely don’t want purple walls, but just to test it out, I did a sample of it throughout the house in different rooms. Some of the bedrooms looked just fine, but the worst room was absolutely the hallway. It actually looked like lavender…

Of course the hallway doesn’t get the best natural light, but seeing how it looked made it easy to eliminate it completely. We definitely don’t want a lavender hallway. 

Funny thing is though, in the fixer upper house, it was such a soft, creamy color…

Lighting makes that much of a difference. (And yes, the color is absolutely the same, and it was mixed correctly. Promise!)

I painted the same samples all throughout the house. In the upstairs living room…

In each bedroom…

Downstairs in the basement…

In the laundry room…

And in the hall bathroom….

After seeing the colors throughout the house, we were able to make a decision we felt really good about. I’ll share all about that in another post, but we ended up deciding on Gray Mist by Benjamin Moore as the main paint color. It’s such a great, soft color that provides a nice neutral backdrop without being completely white. It has gray undertones, but there’s also a slight green in there too. I think it’s going to look great with the flooring we’ve picked (more on that soon), crisp white trim and black accents. 

Honestly, just getting to the point where we could start picking paint colors felt amazing… progress was being made!