Banishing Brown From My House

I like colour. And although many people have beautiful homes with neutral browns and greys, I prefer to surround myself with colour and light, especially as our winters are so long and dark. I don't mind the cold of winter, but hate the constant darkness.

This weekend Mike is patching and painting our downstairs hallway, which actually starts in our mainfloor kitchen. Mike is a bit of a perfectionist, so he thoroughly scraped, patched & sanded all the surfaces as well as removing a door and all the hardware from one doorway.

When we moved into our house it had a grand total of 4 different colours of greige/taupe/brown in a variety of finishes, and often a satin finish was used to patch an eggshell wall. Not only that, but the walls were filled with nail holes and gouges.  Mike painted the girl's rooms before we moved in and has been steadily working away at the rest of the house since then.

Once this hallway is painted we will only have one more room to paint in order to completely banish the unwanted brown from our house - the downstairs family room.

Here are the colours of our house now.  I've tried to include pictures of each room if I have one.

Living Room/Dining Room/Upstairs Hallway: Martha Stewart Beach Grass

Master Bedroom: Glidden Gentle Tide. This is a really hard colour to show in pictures.  It photographs as a grey-blue, but in reality is everything from a warm aquamarine to a pale blue depending on the light.  It is almost identical to Benjamin Moore Palladian Blue.

Oldest daughter's room: Pittsburgh Paint Honeydew Melon.

Youngest daughter's room: Pittsburgh Paint Coral Flower

The kitchen walls and cabinets and the whole house's baseboards are all Behr Vermont Cream.

Somehow looking at these colours in the photos doesn't do them justice.  I'm not much of a photographer and that probably doesn't help. I also realize that every computer monitor shows colour differently, and every person sees colour differently.

I'm so particular about the colours I choose, it literally took me 6 months to choose the white that we used for our baseboards & trim, and I waffled for about a year on the exact colour of green that I chose for the living room & dining room.  It worked out for the best though; when I was choosing the colour of white for my kitchen walls and to colour-match my cabinets, I already knew what my favourite colour of white was and the decision was easy.

I've chosen the colour of our basement family room when we eventually get around to doing it - Periwinkle: