So, I painted the dining room. It was completely unexpected and completely out of order.
Tuesday, while I was working on the basement, I went over our over-stuffed paint shelf again. We had already gotten rid of all of the “oops” paint and the random quarts and gallons. There was still one quart that wasn’t being used though. It was Martha Stewart’s Mariner (dark-ish gray blue) that had been purchased to paint the windows, but it was just wasn’t quite dark enough so I went with a different color, and this quart was still full on the shelf.
At the same time (about a year ago), a paint chip of the same color had been taped to the dining room wall for 6 months. I had really liked it at first, then I didn’t at all, especially after painting the window frame in that color…it just didn’t do it for me. So I tossed the paint chip, and recently decided on a medium gray for the dining room walls.
Back to Tuesday, the quart of Mariner was staring me down. I had no plans for it, so with our new “simplify” mindset, I couldn’t justify keeping it, but I really hated to get rid of it. So I painted a swatch of it on the dining room wall…the dining room was about to be painted anyway, so if we didn’t like it, we’d just paint over it. If we did like it, though, the quart wouldn’t be wasted.
Obviously, we both liked the swatch on the wall. We decided to test it out to see how it looked on the half-wall. Then when we liked it even more, so we kept painting and finished off the quart. Wednesday, I purchased a gallon and painted the whole room. Yesterday, I finished the second coat.
And now we have a very dark dining room.
Our dining room gets very little natural light, so painting it such a dark color is pretty controversial. I will give you my thoughts on that design logic next week. In the mean time, we have a very dark dining room, which is pretty exciting for a design fanatic like me.
I love the color! I would think the light issue could easily be solved with mirrors; it seems to get “enough” light for them to help bounce it around…
Thanks Abbe! It’s working out well so far.
I like! Don’t know why. I don’t like blue and I would normally not like such dark colour on a wall, but here it makes a statement. It looks good, I know you know why it looks good, so I’m eager to hear your thoughts on that.
How funny, Leena. I look forward to your thoughts on my thoughts next week, then! 🙂
So this is how you painted it almost by chance (I love grey, but this looks so theatrical!! – in a good way). I hope you’ll manage the lack of light 🙂
It is! It was a surprise to us too. 🙂
It looks great! I’m eager to see a B&A of the space.
Thanks Tammi! I’m eager to have an after. 🙂
I’m sure I like it better than if it was grey. According to me, if the room is dark, you have two options: painting it white or a shade of white or a very dark colour… Any colour that is supposed to brighten the room like yellow doesn’t work, as I found out at work where they decided to paint the dark staff room bright yellow!
That navy is really pretty with the white trim.
Totally agree with you, either white or dark!
I like that thing hanging on the ceiling. What’s that?