Great part of the world to live in and you are correct grey paint and grey days don’t work well. To choose the right paint color it would help to know what kind/color of flooring you will have. If you are liking whites look at one from Benjamin Moore called distant grey.

Buy a few test pots of different shades of white and slap 'em on the walls. Live with the colors for a while and notice how the light changes them throughout the day.

I disagree about grey not working. We are building in Vancouver where it is also grey but we have tons of big windows, lighter flooring, and lots of white too. Our walls are going to be stonington grey on the main floor and grew owl on the bedroom level. Our kitchen is two tone with the island a dark grey and the rest white. Our counter tops are also a white - ocean foam. Our trim is called cloud white I think!

We are going through the same decision process. We first decided we are not "gray" people, already been through the "Tuscan brown" trend so decided our furnishings point us toward "creamy". We want lighter, more neutral colors. We went to the local Sherwin Williams store and just started pulling paint samples from the "white" section. We compared each sample to a white piece of paper to see how the color leaned - grayish, greenish, pinkish, etc. As we found colors we liked, we then compared them to each other - that really brings out the undertones of the color.

Each paint sample has an LRV number - Light Reflectance Value. - based on a 0-100 scale. This gives you an idea of how strong the color will come across. For instance, the trim we chose has an LRV of 86. A strong, deep color like navy might have an LRV of 15. So our goal was to find wall colors in the 70-80 LRV - strong enough color to pop against the trim but not a strong color.

Once we had several possibilities, we took the samples to our current home and did the same process all over (and over) again. We looked at the colors at various places through the house at various times during the day. The more we did this, the more we began to hone in on the look we want.

Once we had narrowed it down to 3 wall colors and 1 trim color, I purchased the quart size samples that Sherwin Williams sells. (This is the smallest size container of paint they sell due to the accuracy of adding such small amounts of colorants.) I painted half-sheets of poster board with 2 coats of paint using little rollers that S-W sells.

Same process again - compare the large boards in various lights and places. This time we took the samples to the new house. We are in the middle of dry walling so that gave us a fairly good "background" for lighting.

Fortunately this process pointed out that we had chosen a creamy color that came across as too yellow, which we don't want. So back to S-W for another round. Realizing the first choice was too yellow really helped us with our second choice.

In the next step we took our large samples of wall colors to the tile store, the cabinet store and to the slab yard to see how they looked with those elements. Again, these large samples really pointed out how yellow our earlier choice was. This step also helped us understand how the colors relate to the choices we made. Does the paint make the other elements pop or do the colors fade into the background and let the elements stand on their own?

Our builder said it is okay if I paint larger samples on the dry wall at the new house. So that is the last verification of the colors - to see the colors in the house. We won't have light fixtures (no electricity) or our furnishings in the space to really nail down the selections but we have done all the "due diligence" we can do.

I don't care if you are spending $100,000 or $900,000 on your house, if colors and decorating are important to you, you want to make the best choices you can with the tools you have. Unfortunately in building a home, you can't choose the colors with all the other elements in place. So you do the best you can do under the circumstances and keep your fingers crossed that it works!

Best of luck to you!

i believe they have color consultants at the big paint stores. I think SW has them. perhaps they could offer advice for you. They would be familiar w/the gloom and would know what works best.

This is the color we are considering for the floors; warm and medium toned. Sorry that I couldn’t get it bigger. It’s Audra max rigidcore - Aspen Lodge.

Thanks for all the help everyone. This is great!