Love at first hue

Bruce and I started painting our adobe this weekend. We only have half of the office/guest bedroom and one coat in the living/dining area painted which was drying as the parental units arrived into town this weekend. Yay us!

For the office I decided to go with the color I found on a house tour at Apartment Therapy. It was love at first hue and I knew I had to have it. However, convincing Bruce was a wholenother story! With some quick sleuthing on the internet, I came up with a 3 point persuasive speech–primarily how blue not only is a calming color but is used often to maximize productivity. He was sold at point 3:  the color blue is frequently used in gyms because it produces faster and definitely more noticeable results.

The color is “Blue Spa” from Benjamin Moore. You have to search for this particular brand to see which local retailers carry it. We found an Ace store in our area and headed there. I was only intending on coming back either with the swatch or a sample to test it out in our lighting. That plan quickly went out the window. The price for a gallon of BM paint runs on average about $50. We knew we’d need at least 2 gallons because of the darker color and the size of the room.  Well, I just wasn’t about to put $100 worth of paint on these walls–especially since we’re only planning on being here for the next year or two and these days you need to stretch a dollar! Luckily, the friendly sales associate suggested we try their Ace brand which maybe wasn’t quite on the scale as BM, but their quality was just as good. On top of that, a gallon was on sale for $19.99! So, we promptly bought two gallons to take home.

Living Room Color Inspiration

We did some shopping around at other local home improvement stores and found the $19.99 price to be a complete steal–so much that we went the next day to buy more paint for the living room. An issue we have with our unit is the lack of natural lighting–we basically have a total of 2 windows–one in each bedroom and a patio window in the living room. The living room gets the most light and we jumped at the opportunity to make the most of that with light, neutral colors. We love the breezy, beachy feel of this living room from Young House Love and choose our colors accordingly: Latte in eggshell from Sherwin-Williams and Glidden’s Tracery. Actually, the blue from their design is Valspar’s “Under the Sea” but we ended up with a more “neutral” blue. And of course, we went back to Ace to have them mix the paint for us–2 gallon each at $19.99!

Total cost of paints, 6 gallons at $119.94–quite the savings, especially if you compare it to the original cost of one gallon of Benjamin Moore. Will be posting before and after pictures soon!