Guest room makeover, stage 2

After more than a month of working intermittently on the back room that we're in the process of turning into a guest room—pulling out nails, patching the walls where the nails came out, sanding down the patches, and peeling most of the paint off the walls in the process—we finally got the whole room primed last weekend. (Even this step took longer than we expected, as we ran out of primer partway through and had to make a trip to the home center for more, so priming turned out to be a two-day job.) Now, at last, we've reached the point where we can really transform the room with some paint—just as soon as we decide what paint to use.

I'd already decided that I wanted to keep the walls in this room fairly neutral, so they wouldn't clash with the brown-and-magenta quilt we plan to use on the guest bed. I'd managed to narrow my color choices from the assortment shown in this post down to three, opting for the slightly bolder middle shades from each card rather than the off-white shades toward the bottom. However, given what a hassle it was to get this room to the painting stage in the first place, I definitely wanted to be absolutely sure of my final choice before covering a whole wall with it, because I really didn't want to have to do this job more than once. So rather than just relying on the paint chips, I sprang for six dollars' worth of sample-size paint pots to check out how they looked on the actual wall before making the final decision. The three lucky finalists are are, from left to right: Flioli Antique Lace, a light yellowy beige; Sahara Sands, a more peachy tone; and Pacific Shoreline, which shades off toward pink.

If you enlarge the photo of the three swatches, you'll see that they came out rather streaky and uneven. We only had one big paintbrush, and I didn't want to have to wash it and wait for it to dry between uses, so I decided to put up my three test swatches with the cheap little foam brushes we use for staining furniture, which turn out to be less than ideal tools for putting paint on a wall. However, even these somewhat mottled test patches gave us a good enough impression of the colors to eliminate the middle hue right away, since Brian found it too "fleshy." He then used a little mini-roller we'd picked up at the store (technically meant for painting woodwork, according to the label) to reapply the remaining two choices to the wall a little more evenly.

Unfortunately, this just made the waters murkier still. It's not that we couldn't evaluate the colors properly; it's that, once we could see them clearly, we didn't quite see eye to eye on them. (Which isn't surprising, I guess, given that his eye level is about a foot above mine.) Brian was inclined somewhat toward the pinker Pacific Shoreline, while I thought the more neutral Flioli Antique Lace might make a better background for hanging art and suchlike. So in the end, the deciding vote may be in the hands of Their Honors Rock, Paper, and Scissors. But one way or another, we are going to get these darn walls painted before...well, before midwinter, at least.