Put a lot of plants in our little greenhouse today..supposed to get below 29 here before morning. Whatever I cut off to make the plants more manageable in a small space goes on what's left in the ground. Leaves are just starting to fall here..where they land they stay. Pine needles make such a good mulch for winter that I do move some where I need them. Living in town (my folks do) is so different. All the leaves are picked up in baggers and disposed of. I go get what I can when they are bagged and add to the beds here where needed. Not enough leaves to go around so I import them.. and we have lots of trees.

I have another question. If we decide to paint an accent color for the rest of the exterior doors....and I'm still not sure this is a good idea...we have THREE different styled doors on the back porch. A solid 6-panel, a single French door, and a double French door. Will painting these a color different than the trim highlight the fact that none of the doors match? My gut says yes, and just paint them the trim color. OR...paint just the main door that exits from the house (the double French) the accent color, thus making the other doors secondary and less noticable? I have looked at tan colored paint chips until my eyes cross, and don't like any of them. Now I'm considering going lighter with a cream. The yellow undertones seem to be the better match, but I want something a bit muddy that doesn't read YELLOW from the street. I thought this would be a fun project, but since we're hiring this job out, there's considerable pressure to get it right the first time. We could repaint doors and shutters ourselves, so if we goof on those, it's not a huge deal, but the trim color has to be right.

Honestly I think that it may go purpley on you too. I'm not at home w/ my fan decks but looking at it on the monitor though. I think that this is one of those situations where if you see the color that you think is 'it' you may want to take it down a notch. Once the color is on all 4 walls it's going to reflect any tones back on each wall and potentially intensify. Tricky situation. Along the same saturation range but less purpley or bluey I saw Heather Gray 2139-40 and Storm Cloud Gray 2140-40. It looks like Storm Cloud Gray, is getting close to some brown ranges too. Twilight Gray 2137-40 is also pretty. 2 tips: Hold that green color of your chairs next to the chip to see what colors it draws out of the chip. Sometimes you see big things that you never noticed before just looking at only the chip and no other color around it. It can take on a totally differnt color. Second: Look at the neighboring color strips and cards around the color strip that you're looking at. What colors are they leaning towards? Do you like what you see? The strip that you are looking at may well have varying intensities of those colors.

Ha - you must be good luck. Our painter stopped by yesterday and confirmed he'll be starting third week in August. Maybe look at Iron Mountain by Benjamin Moore - it's a brown based black that might work nicely with your doors. Best of luck - be sure you come back and show us what you decide. We're doing a BIG color change too, after 16 years, so I get how nerve wracking it is.