Before you bring back that paint for a retint, find a color that works on the wall. The BM color you want may not look the same on your wall as it does in the magazine. No wash will work. You will just have to repaint once you find the right color. You may have to bring several sample jars home first and put them up on the wall to see what really works in your room.

I agree. Don't waste time with a wash. And unless you have a color chip or have seen the color in person, I wouldn't play around with a color from a picture either. I think you need to do the sample thing. Why don't you head back to HoDe with your mind set to finding something closer to what's in your head? When I was looking for a green for my dining room, (years ago......) I carefully looked at all the chips that didn't work, and thought about what tint needed to be adjusted, then, I went looking for that. In other words, if THIS is too yellow, then, I need something more beige than THIS...

Red

Do you have something in your clothes closet or elsewhere in your home that is just the right color?
If so, you could bring that in for a color match.

Threed, Red, Sweeby, thanks for posting so fast!

OK, so I sheepishly admit that I posted even before the first coat dried... and it is drying closer to a color I like. Still a bit yellow-green for me, but I have a brown sheet tossed over the bed with a lot of yellow and green in it, and I am wondering whether it's throwing the color off for me. I am so, so bad at all this. Red, can I fly you out from CA to be my color consultant?

This wall has been making me crazy for years, because everything looks too dark the moment I put up a sample. I hesitate to admit how many sample colors I have piled up in the garage (before I learned that pale colors are hard if not impossible to sample correctly in sizes under a quart...!!). I have followed the process you very logically recommend, Red, and it has been totally fruitless, and I have been tearing out my rapidly greying hair. So it is also possible that my general looniness wrt this wall is washing over my experience of painting it....

Anywhere else, I'd never admit to being obsessed with wall color. But I know I'm among friends (like-minded crazies?) here.

Maybe I'll put a white sheet on the bed in hopes it'll help me see the wall color better. Is there a visual equivalent of smelling coffee beans to clear out the olfactory sense? I am practically cross-eyed when I look at the *($^*%$ wall by now.

You definitely should let the paint dry before freaking out. Especially if you're using anything but flat finish. (Our painters just finished here and we went with flat on the ceilings but matte on the walls [four kids, need I say more?] and everyday the colors on the walls are changing as the paint is curing.

Also, ditch the brown cover. Make your bed. Put the room how it's supposed to look and then make a decision.

That's what I would do anyway ;)

And it may need more than one coat to achieve the color it was meant to be...DEFINITELY ditch the the brown cover. Try throwing a white sheet over the bed...see if that makes a difference.

This is such a weird room, and such a weird color. I am really having trouble with this, and I appreciate everyone's listening as I work through the painting...

So the first coat is dry. Near the windows (all the way down at the end of the wall -- long bowling-alley room, windows where the pins are, no natural light at all where the bowler stands/bed is), it's a very light tan/beige. Away from the windows it's a lot greyer.

THe second coat usually darkens the color, right? I am wondering whether I should pour a bit of white into the paint while doing the second coat, to keep things light and perhaps to lessen the green aspect in the grey...

Took the weird sheet off the bed, put a white one on. Better, but the greenish tendency's not entirely gone.

Bleaggh. I am still not sure what to do. This has to be finished by tomorrow, when DH and DSs return from their camping trip!

Are you looking for a light taupe which is beige with some gray?

yes, threedgrad, and I think I've got it. Went ahead with the second coat, figuring that if it went too dark I'd do a third coat mixed with some white to lighten it. The second coat went on creamy and gorgeous and perfect.

Why is paint so unpredictable? (more to the point, why am I so impatient?) Anyway, saga over. THanks for the moral support.

walkin I'm glad things turned out all right for you. I know just how you felt. I painted my kitchen weeks and weeks ago and the green is minty and not the rich sage color I coveted. At a certain time of day and with just the right light, it's perfect. But for the rest of the time it's not quite right...something about it...I still haven't hung any artwork. It stopped me in my tracks. But I am just too busy and too tired to repaint it.

I popped the lid off the gallon of Ben Moore's Dry Sage and poured it out into my paint tray, back in March(?). I had spent about 3 fruitless weeks splotching, sampling, and painting on my lunch hour while wearing dress clothes. Insane. I HAD to paint that entry and get my new antique sideboard in it's spot. Finally, I just went with a suggestion here (Patricia) and threw myself in with a whole gallon--no sample first---of the Dry Sage.

Well..........I refused to even look at the color in the paint tray. It was Saturday morning and I was gonna paint. If I didn't love it, then, we would cross that bridge down the road. As it went on the wall, I thought it was pretty dark---really, much darker than I thought it would be. Oh well..........serves me right for not going with Pigeon. Or French Grey. Or one of two dozen other shades I bought in sample sizes that were all....

...Too Brown
...Too Drab
...Too Green
...Too Grey
...Too Blue (Yuck...no blue please!)
...Too Light
...Too Dark (RH Flax was strong contender. Beautiful.)
...Too Cool
...Too much like every other color I already have!

Anyway......it was looking pretty dark. I did not want a dark color for the entry, I wanted something similar in depth to the Baby Turtle in the LR or the Northampton Putty in the Dining Room. It was also green. **Sigh** I can't get away from green. Tried to go brown. Tried to go grey. Whatever. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum.......Decorating Forum that is! As it dried, it turned sage*grey*blue something different. Something that was exactly like the something that I had in my head. Something that looked.....in my entry....very very close to the color that French Grey (like Allison's Laundry and Kitchen) look online. But the sample card of French Grey, made up into a sample quart, did not look quite right. And it's a funny, funny, thing about color. We think we WANT---THAT color! The color SHE has. Or the Color in the House Beautiful article. The color in the Pottery Barn catalog with the lovely furniture. But a lot of the time, THAT color, I mean, THAT actual color....the one that's named on the chip---is NOT the color you want. The color you want is the color that color looks like in someone Else's house. So you have to look for your color. Then you have to paint it. That's an act of courage and absolute bravery. Then, it has to dry. Because Drying, as well as adding back furniture, art, plants, and rugs, is what really creates your color.

Walkin', we need to see the room. You know that. I just spent 10 minutes typing my drivel so you would have time to post a photo. Hope it's there when I click

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Red

Heehee to Redbazel's last post. I had something similar happen... when we painted the master bedroom in the previous house, I used a rather odd olivey-gold almost the exact color of those enormous green California olives (C2 Cheetah, quite similar to BM Blair Gold). When we poured it out of the can into the tray, it looked like the contents of a baby's diaper. DH stared at me as if to say "Are you KIDDING? What were you THINKING?" It was horrible. Outright gross. But, I'd already blown over seventy bucks on this paint, it was going on the d@mn wall. First coat wet - *scream* *cry*. Dry, it's not quite so awful but still not very good. Second coat wet - much discouragement. Second coat dries and "hmmmmmm, maybe this'll work after all". Remember frequent admonition on Home Dec about putting all your stuff back in the room before making the final decision on whether you hate the new paint. Move everything back, hang curtains and artwork. WOW. Perfect.

OTOH, BM Boardwalk never stopped looking either peach or Band-Aid color, depending on the light, even when all the stuff went back in. You just never know, which is irritating to say the least. DH would have throttled me had I demanded we repaint, though, so it stayed until we moved out 2 years later!

Red, Mari, so appreciate the stories... thank you for making me feel slightly less deranged than we all know I am. I am so glad DH is out of town right now and not witnessing this.

Well, CR@P. ('scuse me.) So much for creamy and gorgeous... dried to totally the wrong color! I'm guessing the idjit at Home Depot mixed the paint wrong. Instead of tinting it at 125% as I asked (three times-- she gave me various irritated looks -- but I could tell in my heart of hearts she wasn't doing it right) she tinted it at 100%, so now my wall -- which I wanted to be greige -- is vanilla. All. Wrong. Lovely color, but not at all what I wanted.

Back to HD to see whether it can be fixed. Red, DH has the digital camera or I would post pics... as it is, you'll have to use your imagination! Again, CR@P. So annoyed.