All You Create

OK, so maybe there’s not much to discuss when the topic is paint vs. wallpaper. These days, paint is all the rage, with wallpaper trying desperately (but not very successfully) to make a comeback.

Me? I like to buck the trends, don’tcha know.

First off, we have paint — in this case, exterior paint. Sure, we had our house painted a lovely silver gray, with just a hint of blue. Sort of reminiscent of the coast. I won’t bore you all with the long, drawn-out story — suffice it to say, we had our brand-new house painted a second time.

This time, we stayed with gray (but of course!) but chose a true gray. What’s a true gray? It’s a slippery sucker, that’s what it is. True gray is quite hard to capture. This gray is too blue. That one, too brown. The other, too green. Then there’s the purple gray. The yellow gray. The too-dark gray. The gray that may as well we white, it’s so light. You get my drift.

We ended up with Sherwin Williams’ March Wind — as true a gray as we could get our hands on. And I, for one, wasn’t 100% sold on it after seeing a swatch painted on top of the blue-gray first coat. But once it was on, and once the white trim was all touched up — voila! — loveliness:

Never mind my thumb in the corner; my oldest is Vanna-Whiteing the front porch

The second item for your consideration: wallpaper. Now, most people shy away from wallpaper. I, too, shy away from it in most instances. However, the notion of having one small room — in our house, the half bath — wallpapered with nautical paper caught my fancy. And to tone it down a little, we added wainscoting to the bathroom so that wallpaper wouldn’t suffocate our guests.

I had narrowed the selection down to two map wallpapers: One was primarily creamy yellows and whites, while the other was primarily soft blues. I leaned toward the lighter yellow-white combo, but my husband liked the blue wallpaper. In part, it may have been more of a vote against my choice because he didn’t like the way its map was drawn. Regardless, we ended up going with the blue paper. And now that it’s up, I, too, am in love with it. Here’s a not-very-good photo of the paper above the guest toilet. In person, it’s softly, subtly fabulous:

Map wallpaper

That’s it for the last Monday before we close on the house. Aack!

SK

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