Fifty Shades of Yellow

If you have been following our DIY journey for any length of time, you know that I have a strong aversion to yellow walls. It is not that I detest the color yellow; in fact, I am quite fond of yellow when used where appropriate. I like lemons, Waffle House, Big Bird, canaries, the sun, etc.. I do not appreciate, however, the use of a particularly offensive shade of yellow throughout my home. When we first purchased our house, we really liked the colors that the first person who had it under contract chose.....for the most part. For a year, we lived with these colors choices and worked around them.  To be honest, I am very fond of a couple of the room colors and intend to leave them. As time moves on, however, I am becoming less and less comfortable with the bright, chameleonic personality of the yellow.

You see, yellow paint on the interior can be tricky; while the color can at first appear cheerful and even somewhat neutral, our particular shade of yellow was actually numerous shades in one. Now, I am not a color-ologist or whatever you call a person who names the Crayola box, but I am a concerned citizen seeking to warn you about the tricky nature of certain shades of yellow (disclaimer: not ALL shades of yellow).

Our yellow inhabited three rooms and a bathroom of our home. While at first I thought (or convinced myself that) the yellow made things feel more spacious, eventually I grew to realize that what was intended to be the same shade of yellow throughout the house, ended up being a different shade in each room and furthermore, a different shade at different times of the day.

So..... enter Amy and Chris, paint swatches, good friends and a bottle of wine (or two). The first room we tackled was the living room, which you may know about from reading our post THE YELLOW THAT KEPT ME UP AT NIGHT.  I will spare you the gruesome details of that adventure and sum it up to say that our new, Behr Mocha Latte living room is a latte more livable (see what I did there. lol).

The next room to tackle was the dining room. Once I saw the impact the dark brown color had on the overall tone of the living room, there was no going back. So....Chris went out of town for a day and I had a dear friend over for a night of painting and wine. She and I finished painting the dining room in a couple of short hours (trim and all). The dining room formerly known as yellow is now a delightful, clean shade of grey (Behr: "Anonymous"). Needless to say, I am not addicted to re-painting that which is yellow. The next opportunity that presented itself (i.e. the hubby went out of town), I grabbed two of my favorite friends (you know who you are), a couple of bottles of wine, a veggie pizza and a gallon of paint.

As I have mentioned before, our home is very small, but the rooms are rather large. Our foyer is actually large enough to be useful (hence the "nook", etc.).  In order to make the foyer a little more inviting and a little less "HEY I'M YELLOW!!!!," I opted for a dark brown shade similar to the one we chose for the living room. Oddly enough, Home Depot no longer had Behr Mocha Latte, so I just grabbed something that looked close (it is just paint, after all).

<Exhibit A: Yellow walls

<A few hours later, we have a complete project.  Marcie insists on being present for the "after" pictures. 

 Nook in the Yellow era, prior to painting (yes, those are glasses of merlot):

                        

And Nook post-painting:

While painting a room is not necessarily a major DIY challenge, it really can completely change the look and feel of a room. I am beginning to find that when I get tired of a space, painting it almost always lifts my spirits and gives me a new outlook on life in that room. The foyer that was once super bright and cheerful (to the point of making my eyes hurt), is now warm and welcoming. I might get sick of brown eventually and if I do, I will just head back to the paint center to fulfill a new craving for change. 

I am obsessed with painting something navy blue eventually....

Moral to the story:
Why live an off-white eggshell life when you can live
a  high gloss mocha latte one?