hi Tina, yes, I'm familiar with regular milk paint; I used it for a number of projects a few years back. Love the stuff! Love that matte chalky tactile finish, too. If one can apply this Sloan chalk paint on top of other finishes, sounds like it's different from milk paint in that it has some kind of latex or acrylic additives. I know they market an acrylic binder that can be added to regular ole milk paint to achieve the same kind of coverage. But that must make it a bit more like a regular paint, and I have to say I'm rather fond of the unique way milk paint can be thinned as desired for that slightly see-through washed wood effect. Great tip on the ammonia as remover, cyn47, thanks! We tried just about everything to get 100-year-old milk paint off our kitchen woodwork in former house; can't recall if we tried ammonia. We finally resorted to a commercial preparation that I thought was more pricey than it was worth. At least we have established a definitive connection between felines and chalk/milk paint. As my contribution towards minimizing general grumpiness, here's a shot of my kitty on one of my old milk-paint projects. Well, at least his ears:

Thank you! So much great feedback. Sadly, the paint job is a necessity rather than just aesthetics -- paint on the back side is failing pretty badly & peeling off in layers. (After reading up on the paint forum, I think it was just too many layers of latex on top of old oil paint without adequate prep.) Maybe we will keep it close to current color. I'm not sure what color it is, but I'll have to stop by the BM store and pick up a tab for Briarwood. I think those color visualizers are just a bit off, at least on our monitor -- Down Pour is a very smurf-y blue on my screen. Luckily, SW store is right down the street. Of the SW colors, we liked Mineral Deposit -- gray, but not quite so dark. Johnmari, my wife said exactly that about warm trim looking bad with cool gray field color. I just want to get away from the current ultrawhite, just tone down a bit but not too much. Shutters? I think we will someday, after we've finished the essentials. Of course, being picky, I don't want to just screw aluminum shutters that don't match window size on there, so might be a while given that real shutters & hardware are pricey. The suggestion about doing the sash black is good--that could look really sharp and make the windows pop a bit more until we can dress it up a bit more with shutters. Absolutely agreed on the landscaping solutions. Could be more varied and it would add a lot. THANK YOU for all your suggestions, such a helpful group & nice little corner of the internet.

Can you post a picture so we can see what you are talking about? It is impossible to deal with color without seeing it.

There's a Glidden color called Grey Squirrel 30YY 14/070. You can get a chip/sample from The Home Depot or any Pittsburgh Paints Store - they both have Glidden's Master Palette colors. Gauntlet looks VERY battleship gray (no warmth), Gauntlet Gray has a value of 5, that's about right. Hue is 1.42Y-so it should be a warm gray--tending towards brown? GG has an LRV of 17. And it doesn't have a lot of Chroma (colorfulness) so it quite literally is a near neutral gray. Meaning its proportion of grayness is greater than its proportion of colorfulness. Which is why you're perceiving it as battleship gray, no warmth. In comparison, Grey Squirrel has about the same LRV, 14, but it has more than twice the Chroma. Which means it's farther from a true neutral gray. It has more colorfulness and it's not going to look like battleship gray.