Where cheating on primer really shows up, is if someday you decided to hang wallpaper. The drying of the wallpaper paste will literally pull the paint off the drywall. I have run across this "self priming" paint when hanging wallpaper. I would put a pre-paper sealer on the walls first, and then hang the paper. All done quite "kosher" and according to accepted practices. A couple days later the customer would call and complain that the seams were lifting. Sure enough, the seams are coming up and the paint is stuck to the back of the wallpaper,. leaving bare drywall paper showing on the wall! Obviously, the paint was not bonded to the wall! I know of no way to correct this problem, other to remove the wallpaper and advise the customer not to hang more wallpaper. So long as only paint is used, the bonding situation does not seem to be aggravated.

uscpsycho--we just had the entire interior of our historic 1905 remodel painted Modern Gray and I love it! There is a LOT of trim--chunky moldings and baseboards and window casings. We painted all of that SW Alabaster and love it too. It is a creamy white without yellow undertones. I will try to find pics to upload for you to see. Also--rughdesign.com is a blog devoted entirely to Sherwin Williams colors and has an extensive library of each color and what other SW paint compliments that color. I relied on her blog a lot. Best of luck! Fun but very stressful choosing paint colors.

Double thumbs up to Lori for sharing a lot of good knowledge on color science. Some of the regional paint companies will have their paint chips organized very similarly because they are part of a trade group that creates the chipsets for them. I'm not sure if Dunn-Edwards is in one of this organizations though. Adrienne, I don't see any harm in trying to get the offending area repainted. It sounds to me like someone used the wrong formula, on that second color, or the database came up with a match and that second formula was used for some reason. I have some insight into the paint side of this. There is a database of tint formulas for all of the colors on the chip racks, as well as a way to match color samples that the customer sends in. Humans usually check these databases to make sure the formulas make sense. The formulas are also optimized to use less expensive tints. 90% of the time, the customer wants some form of white, gray or beige, so the paint is typically tinted with some combination of black, red oxide, yellow oxide, or raw umber. Magenta and gold/medium yellow is typically avoided if possible due to higher cost and lower durability (sadly, brighter organic pigments don't last as well as the oxides).

Visit the SW website and look at their top 50 colors. There are numerous neutrals that would work for you. If you look at pictures on Houzz and see a color you like, frequently the color will be named in the comments. However, colors never look the same on a computer as they do in person, so you should definitely sample a couple colors in your space before deciding. Ask the contractor if he can give you a spare piece of drywall 2 - 3 feet square that you can put samples on. Be sure to prime the piece first. HD and Lowes also sell small pieces that most people use for patching if the contractor can't accommodate you. Luckily navy goes with a lot of different colors. Be careful coordinating with the white cabinets as the previous poster noted. Also be thinking about what is going to work with your floors. The contractor will also ask you to pick a trim color, so be thinking about that as well, although that choice comes after you choose your wall color.