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One of my favorite shows on TV is called Changing Rooms on BBC America. Together with my other favorite guilty pleasure, Ground Force, I dream of someday having a home which looks like those shown on these two import series. By the way, Changing Rooms is the inspiration behind the wildly popular Trading Spaces on TLC. Inspired creatively, my other half and I decided this weekend past would be "painting weekend". As we are currently having our foyer painted by professionals (hopefully as I type this) and had also just had our ceilings in our main level patched and painted, we turned our focus to the living room, dining room and kitchen. We decided that we were going with Green as our primary color scheme and had picked out and bought paint in 3 shades of green. Dark Green as an accent color in our dining room below the chair rail, medium green as our formal living room color and light green as our hall/foyer color. Our family room had been painted previously a light tan/cream color. In our kitchen, we decided to paint the walls a shade up from the family room called "warm suede" I think. Then, to bring continuity to the dining room, we painted the walls from the chair rail up in the same color.

So, now that you are totally confused, I will mention, we started with the dining room first. The suede color and dark green looked brilliant together and we were very happy. Then we moved on to the living room. We cracked the can and looked at the medium green we selected and my wife got nervous. I said, lets put it on the walls, then look and see how it turns out and how it flows with the other room. After all, it was on the same color chart sheet... it should look great. It didn't. It was way too dark and an odd shade of green. To make sure we weren't just nuts, we picked out a piece of the foyer wall and proceeded to paint the lightest green out there to get a visual sense of how it would flow together. The light green looked good... the medium green looked horrid, the dark green and suede looked wonderful. We even brought our furniture back into the living room and sat in there for a while looking at the walls. It was mid day Saturday and we had a party to attend so Stacey and I decided to sleep on it.

Sunday comes and we stare again at the paint. We decide it is too dark but that the light green might work. Luckily, we left all the tape up so we didn't have to go through masking off the floor and crown molding again. Finally, we get the room painted light green and while it needs another coat to cover the medium green, it looks much better. Problem is now, that upon seeing it in the room as a whole, I can't imagine having our two story foyer covered in this light green in addition to that room. Maybe in Florida, but not in the Northeast where we live. So, we are considering moving to the lightest of light greens for the foyer when I and my wife now are focused on how the light green seems to be questionable with the dark green and suede in the next room. The suede just isn't going to cut it with the light green as both rooms are very open and connected by a large archway. So, we decide, maybe we should paint the suede the light green and draw the green in that way.

We begin to cover the suede color in light green and cut in on the trim and I am more and more disheartened by the way things look. My wife seems ok with it but all I am seeing is light limey green in my whole first floor and I am getting woozy. First of all, let me mention that Green is one of my least favorite colors... but yet we somehow ended up with 2 green cars and now my whole first floor is peppered with green accents.

It's at this point where I say to my wife 5 words that blow both of our tempers... "this isn't going to work". So, we talk about it further. I tell her that this just isn't what I expected and that it's just not coming together. We agree that the dark green and suede really in the dining room looked good and my wife really wanted the living room to be in the suede color too but had been concerned that I "didn't want the whole main level to be tan". I relent... tan was better than lime. All these problems seem to be centered around the fact that we are trying to blend natural wood floors with grey carpet in the foyer. Picking a color that works well with both has been difficult at best. Stacey and I never fight over picking out just about anything from clothes to furnishings to appliances... but color seems to be our impasse.

So, we come to the decision we should have made in the first place. The living room and kitchen will be soft suede colored. The dining room will be the dark green with soft suede accents and the foyer and family room will be the light tan/crème color... the one on the same color chart as the soft suede.

On Monday, we begin painting the living room for a 3rd time in the 3rd different color and set about fixing the mess in the dining room. We also painted the kitchen.

A perfectly good holiday weekend shot all to hell.

It actually turned out pretty well. We'll see how the foyer looks when I get home tonite.

Everything looks easier on TV. Next challenge... the basement. I've decided on blues there. 3 shades to be precise. What I am calling the Future World Blue theme.

For some reason... I'm not concerned about that. Maybe I sniffed too much paint fumes over the weekend.