A new, dark dining room

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.