Friday Kitchen Blogging, or Why Does That Nice Buff Color Turn Into Buttercup Yellow in MY Kitchen

It has not been a banner couple of days here at Kitchen Painting Central. After being insufferably pleased with myself yesterday morning for managing to nicely paint the ceiling with only a few accidental dabs on the ceiling fan housing, I loaded up the old PaintStick with "Pear" from the Eddie Bauer collection at Lowes, and went to work. "Gee, that's awfully yellow," I thought, as the color started to coordinate entirely too well with our ghastly floor. "Did they mix this right?" I dabbed a bit on the 6-up taped-together paper chips that had been hanging on the wall for months so I could be sure it was the color I wanted. Yup, same color. On the chip, it looks like a lovely Arts & Crafts buff color, but on the wall it became buttercup yellow. It probably has something to do with the fact that a big blank painted wall just isn't going to look the same as one with lovely wood wainscoting and a plate rail.

So this morning I high-tailed it down to Norton's, the big paint and wallpaper store on Route 17 in Paramus, in search of Benjamin Moore color sample bottles to slap on the wall and make a better choice. Two hours later, after rejecting various shades of khaki (too green), beige (too drab), taupe (too gray) and various creams (too pink), I found that "Rich Cream" was the least obnoxious color available, and more or less coordinated with the Arts & Crafts wallpaper border I'd bought LAST YEAR. So after unloading some stuff from the basement and piggybacking onto my neighbors' garage sale I painted the soffits a lovely velvety shade called Peale Green, which looks awful with the dark laminate of the current cabinet veneers, but will look fabulous with the border up and the new, warmer oak doors. Then I high-tailed it back to Norton's, where I tormented the poor guy in the paint department, who was ten minutes from quitting time, and faced with this short, middle-aged woman asking him to tone down the yellow tone in this color a bit, but please don't make it pink.

By this time, my sciatica was really flaming up, and my feet were killing me, so I cried uncle and called it a day.

Tomorrow it's back to the PaintStick, and more photos. And somehow convincing Mr. Brilliant that all this is NOT going to be hideous.