SOMA Living April 2022

REAL ESTATE

“Ugh!” “It’s terrible!!”

“Why is it so yellow.” “We can’t keep this….”

So started the conversation between me and my wife I as we looked at the newly painted primary bathroom of the house we’re renovating for resale. The walls were covered in our favorite go to white, “White Dove” by Benjamin Moore. Normally it’s all creamy and delicious but yet, somehow in this room, it was both yellow and sour to the eyes. Actually, it was my own fault. I broke my own rule: Never fully paint a room without seeing what the color is really going to look like in the space. And I don’t mean holding up a 1” x 1” chip against the wall. I mean go to the paint store, buy a sample jar and paint some on the wall. Or, if painting isn’t your thing go to www.samplize.com. Here you can order painted sheets that you can stick on a wall to get a good idea of what the color will look like. I get questions all the time like, “What color should I paint my dining room?” Or, “What’s a good color for my living room?” Well, since I couldn’t make a bathroom look good using the world’s most beloved white paint color, I’m clearly not the person to answer those questions! But no one is. Because the answer is, “I’ll tell you when I see it on the wall”. I’ve taken seminars taught by Amy Figueroa of Benjamin Moore on how light effects paint color. There’s sunlight, and more specifically, from which direction is that light coming into the room. A northern facing window’s sunlight is vastly different than a window facing south. Now days the color temperature of a light bulb can be anywhere from 2700K to 5000K, each will also skew the color of paint. So, after spending a Saturday testing different whites on our bathroom walls and seeing how the changing sun effected the color, we settled on B.M.’s “Dove Wing”. This leads me to another point. When are you going to be seeing the room the most? I know with work from home being so prevalent that answer may be, ALL THE TIME! But if there are spaces that get used at certain periods of the day, make sure that the color you pick looks it’s best at that time. So the lesson: Never assume you know what the paint is going to look like on the wall, until it’s actually on the wall! My next challenge, finding the perfect blue for the primary bedroom walls (pictured).

APRIL 2022 | SOMA LIVING 21

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