Your opinion is very much welcomed and appreciated. I'm pretty shocked both of those are Indian River! The Stone House I asked about is for my kitchen. I had them paint it in an off-white color that turned out washed out. I think I needed to make that mistake to stop being gun-shy with colors (house now is mostly white). I all about gave up on beiges/tans as the samples I was painting were turning red/pink or green depending on light. The Stone House I found on this forum or another googling for people asking the same question-- what color to use with maple toffee cabinets and ubatuba / verde granite. Most people pulled from the green in the granite, but im not a fan of green paint. One person went with the Stone House and I like it. It pulls from the beigey/butterscotch color in the granite and the grain in the cabinet wood. I think it's a winner As you can see instead of painting all over the walls now i'm using flat white poster boards that im rolling on two coats of the color im sampling. Just masking tape them wherever or even cut them up like I did in the kitchen. In the living room pictures the color over the fireplace is Indian River, the one next to it is Baja Dunes and the one next to the kitchen pass-thru is Plymouth Rock. Unfortunately none of my pictures are great color representations due to lighting and camera, but the Indian River looks very different than the pics you posted. Now im concerned it'll look much different after the whole room is painted. I picked out lots of materials for two bathrooms and a kitchen remodel but the hardest and most frustrating part is paint color. The way they can drastically change into unwanted tones due to so many factors drives me nuts. http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/5950/img0645mp.jpg http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/9057/img0646mq.jpg http://img863.imageshack.us/img863/2179/img0651q.jpg http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/9004/img0652q.jpg http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/4748/img0650g.jpg

rhome410 - yes, it amazes me that I can take anything to a paint store and they can supposedly match it! I've never done it before so don't know how accurate the results are, but we'll see! kpaquette - glad your experience with creating colors was good! I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I don't regret it! Kat - well, I'm trying for a medium slightly smokey gray-blue since I normally am not a fan of blue walls. I'm trying to coordinate with a stupid rug that I plan to use in the living room, so not even sure I'll end up with a color I'll like! I'm wondering now if I can manage to get enough of a piece of the rug to take and have them match at the paint store - it would be really funny to lug an 8 x 10 rug into the store - haha! Anyway, there's no way I'd ever be able to replicate the color I've concocted, so I'm glad they can! I think I started with SW Cityscape as a base (it's a dark gray-blue), then added some Meditative and Sleepy Blue and I think a bit of Passive. Now that I look at the names all together it's hilarious - the room should put us right to sleep!! Oh, thanks, I am finally feeling much better - Sat I felt about 50% better - just enough to deal with paint, and yesterday I was almost back to normal. That is so true - I've been thinking that it's surprising that we aren't sick all the time with all the dust and fumes that go along with remodeling! mairin - I love that BM Adagio!!! The only problem is that I think it might be too close to the paint in the dining room/kitchen - darn!! That's been the biggest issue since I really like the paint in there and it's a light gray. So I've tried to find something that's more a med color and that's much more blue so that it doesn't look the same at first glance. I'm beginning to think it's impossible because I don't like pastel blues or really bright blues in living rooms. Honestly, if it weren't for my husband, I'd use the same paint color that I like in all 3 rooms! :) Here's a photo of the paint in the kitchen where you can see the very edge of the dining room at the left (which is right by the living room) - do you think this color (it's SW Argos in the kitchen and a combination of Argos and Passive in the dining room) and Adagio look too much alike? dawn8b - I will most definitely be using a color consultant if I ever need to do any painting of this magnitude again :) tudorlover - I wish I could just paint the house in one or two colors I love! My husband insists that we need more colors, so I'm trying to come up with a different one for practically every room. And while I love gray, he doesn't (or thinks he won't until he sees it!), so I'm trying to disguise the fact that I'm looking for paints with gray tones :) As long as it doesn't have the word "gray" in it I'm OK - haha!

Hi, It's a good idea to sponge down the new drywall before painting. We always sand down rough spots before the first finish coat. Often defects will show up after priming that require "point-up" with more mud or spackle. If you are spraying, you must vacuum the whole floor because the air movement will blow all kinds of crap from floor to paint. Sometimes finishers mix their own ceiling texture from paint w/drywall mud added to it, so it has the feel of paint, but since it's part mud, it is more porous and will stain easier. For a first-class job, paint it; if money's an issue, wait a few years and and paint it when you are ready to repaint the rooms. Casey

FYI, a gable is just the wall under the pointy part of the roof. The decorative boards on your garage gable are, I think, battens, which are just pieces of wood that cover up the seams between the wood siding. They are primarily decorative, and if you don't like them, you could probably take them off. (On older Tudor homes, you might see a similar effect created with actual beams, and those would be structural and not just cosmetic). Because your house has the whole California/Mediterranean thing going on, I don't think that highlighting the battens is going to be in keeping with the style of the home, so I would favor painting them to blend in. You could remove them, but you might find that makes the garage gable too plain and boring. As others have suggested, you will have to choose a paint that works with the stone, unless you want to remove the stone. The stone definitely has some of that peachy thing going on, although it has some more muted grays that you could work with. Based on your pics and my images for Waynesboro Taupe (that is, take this with a grain of salt since computers don't always render color right), I don't really like the Waynesboro Taupe with the stone. Here are some colors I liked better: Chelsea Gray Gettysburg Gray Sandy Hook Gray Fairview Taupe Iced Marble (this one runs to blue-gray, which might be too much out on a limb for your neighborhood) I think that you could keep black as an accent color (I like black and taupe together) for the shutters and maybe the front door. I would like to see the garage door go dark, either matching the wall color or even going a few shades darker. The white draws too much attention to what really isn't a great feature of the house (I'm not a fan of prominent garage doors in general, let's not make them stand out more than they have to.) Benjamin Moore's color viewer has a sample picture called "Ageless Tudor" that has some characteristics in common with your home (stone, board and batten gable) that you might want to use for experimenting. Or I think you can upload your own photo, although I can't vouch for how well that works.