SW Croissant

I have BM Truffle and the furniture in the room is all in the brown family...and I do not have any pink tones whatsoever in this room. It's actually a tad on the masculine side to me.

c2 mortar- my favorite

One thing you may want to ask the person mixing the paint is that you want a taupe shade of color that has "raw umber" for one of the colorants in the paint. I used to mix paint at a hardware store and I loved how the raw umber would give so many colors a warm brown-gray tone. I have SW Plantation Beige and it is in the gold family but has that great raw umber in it so it doesn't look real yellow. HTH

Beautiful recommendations and excellent advice, twotogo!

Is it like asking for black in paints to darken the gray factor?

I'm off to SW today.
It's like trying to find a purple without red or blue dominating. Then throw in the fact I want a gray, dusty purple? ooooooo. Tough!

Keep 'em coming!

Thanks.
C.

I can't remember for sure but there are about 8 - 10 colorants that are used to "mix" those paint colors you find on those "swatches or samples" you see on the paint display. Everything is so "automated" today but they should be able to tell you what colorants are in the paint. Raw Umber is one of those colorants; so when you pick out a color you think you may want, take it to the "paint mixing person" and ask them what colorants are in your sample. If there is red in it the color will have that pink hue to it but if there is raw umber in it there will be a more brownish-grayish tone.

I like BM Stone Hearth.

Oh, that's good.
I went yesterday and with my X-DH's contractor's license, I got an account at Sherwin-Williams and more importantly, a paint chip thing. Now I have BM & SW, so I can check out more of the commonly recommended paints.

I am learning, learning!

Thanks for your suggestions. I'm looking up each and every one. The thing is, I like so many. Not enough rooms!!
(I hope they keep coming!)

Hi. I have SW Portobello, Latte and Nomadic Desert and don't think there's any hint of pink in them. Love them all! I obsessed about paint for a looong time. Good luck with your search!

Ohhh..

I just love these subtle tones. I currently have 23 chips hanging on my living room wall. [LOL]

I thought I had it with a Glidden & Valspar color. Then I made the mistake of going to SW, as I mentioned earlier.

Now all the other chips I discarded look good again, plus the new ones.

Gotta get my sister over here. Usually, I take one look and pick. I seem to be immobilized with this.

Thanks for writing!
C.

Ha ha! I have used the term "paralyzed" many times to describe my months of indecision about all the various aspects of a reno., but I definitely like "immobilized" better! :-) Best wishes for a quick resolution!

Tip about hanging paint chips on your living room wall (esp. 23 of them - man, I remember that!!!).

Get chips that are as BIG as possible!!! Get a bunch in each color and tape them together (from the back) if you have to. Then tape white paper to your wall and put the chips on top of that. Otherwise your current wall color will influence what these colors look like.

Once you've narrowed it down a bit, I know with the BM colors at least, they have REALLY BIG chips available for decorators. Maybe you can get some of those.

Once you've *really* narrowed it down, buy some of the paint and paint a large part of a wall or two. It looks really different once it's real paint (and once it's REALLY REALLY BIG).

I learned all of that here on GW. :-)

Excellent advice about taking a bunch of chips.

I can paint this room once the ceiling is sanded & primed. (The sanding is the hold up.) Perfect for choosing paint, the walls are already primed & white.

It's a NW facing window of 7' wide x 6' tall, so I get so much light in there sometimes it's hard to actually SEE the chips!

I like the BM color things. I have a huge, 1.5" x 1.5" of BM's "Kasbah" (AF-640) on my den wall. It's got the same sized window so I'm going to go darker in this cozy room. This is a purple that goes beautifully w/ all the colors I've asked about here, plus the extremely gray-green I'm painting my kitchen cabs. I wanted a purple so gray the light would chg it to gray at different times. No preponderance of blue or red, a true, (gray) purple. I'm in heaven.

I like these sample squares & I like the little testers of SW. Sadly, lots of these samples are HD & Lowe's standards. Great, but I'll have to buy a bunch.

Thanks again!!
Christine

As far as sample pots go, I would recommend that you choose three or four colors that you think will work the best and start there. Then, if you don't like those, go back for another round. You need to narrow down your options. Remember, there is not ONE best choice, there are many options.

I just bought a sample of SW Natural Tan (mixed in Behr paint) and I think it's going to look great. I'm thinking of a soft taupe for the dining room...just dark enough to give my stuff some contrast, but nothing too dark. I didn't want any kind of pink or yellow undertones.

Behr has a color called Sandstone Cove, that to my eye, looked like a perfect match, but the paint guy said no, the Behr color had a red undertone. I had him check the colorant recipe, and sure enough, there's no red in the Natural Tan, but there is in Sandstone Cove.

I also have a chip of SW Kilim Beige, a color that gets mentioned a lot on this forum. It looks like it doesn't have any weird pink/yellow/green tones to it, and it's a really nice color, just too dark for the area I want to paint.

And about the samples...I had decided that Martha Stewart Ballet Slipper Pink was going to be THE perfect color for the entryway. The chip looked beatiful taped to the wall, went nicely with the rug, etc. Bought a sample and painted a large piece of foam board, and...yuck! I'm going to stare at it a few more days, but it might be back to the search for pink paint.

I agree about narrowing it down and buying a few sample pots. Then go to Hobby Lobby, Michaels, Joanns and buy some foam core boards (in poster board section). Paint those and tape them to the wall that way you can see a true color while waiting on the sanding and priming to be finished. You can also move them around the room to see how they look in daylight and evening lighting.

I feel your pain. I've been going nuts trying to find a taupe-y color for my basement, and every time I thought I found "the one", the sample turned pink when I tried it on a few walls.

I think I've narrowed it down to BM Hot Spring Stones and Pismo Dunes. I've been looking at the swatches for a couple of days now, and those are the only ones that don't make me cringe.

We have used Behr's Gallery taupe on our living room ceiling with Behr's Rich Taupe on the walls and Love it! No Red. And we've recently painted our bedroom with Behr's Gothic Amethyst and Love that as well, and we used Behr's Baked Biscotti on the the bedroom ceiling. All of our trim is Swiss Coffee!

ooo.
Gotta look these new ones up.
Swiss Coffee sounds like the color of cafe au lait -- at least in my head. !

I am so excited about paint it's almost embarrassing.

Christine

So far, I have the SW & BM chip charts. I don't have Behr yet, but I'm thinking I might need to. :)

The following colors, which I really want to see, are not on their chip chart!
Could you folks give me the paint numbers, if you can, so I can pursue this further? Thanks,

SW Croissant
SW Plantation Beige
SW Natural Tan

BM Truffle
BM Hot Springs Stone
BM Pismo Dunes

SW Natural Tan is #7567. The more I stare at my swatch of it, the more I like it. YMMV.

GRRRRRR...
Evidently my SW chip thing has a sequel.
Mine only goes up to 6983.

I'll have to go back and whine.

The colors I can look up are stunning. It's also funny that the recommended colors are always next to someone else's recommended color! Great minds....

Christine
Formerly C F Muehling

Croissant is 7716

Here is a link that might be useful: Croissant

BM Hot Spring Stones and Pismo Dunes are AC-31 and AC-32 (America's Colors).

Dawnp, if that color is in the orange family, it has red in it. You're saying in the light of your house, though, it's not leaning in any way towards pink?

I gotcha, mcgillicuddy. I don't have those in my swatch thing. I'll just go find 'em at the store!

Thanks, guys.
Christine