i am still slowly putting my revamped guest room together and over the course of the week, i’ll be posting bits and pieces of the space. today, it’s about the paint because it’s really one of the easiest ways to completely change a room, even though it can be more than a little nerve-wracking because it can be easy to go awry with just the wrong tint!

about the room: our guest room is the smallest room in our very normal-sized house. it has great windows that face west and gets nice light. previously i had painted it a light yellow that i loved, but it was starting to show some (okay, a lot) of wear and i wanted to create a more soothing and restful environment. i knew i wanted the walls to be a neutral sort of yellow-y green (tall order, i know, but i knew what i wanted!) that would be soothing with white bedding and pops of red and pink.

so i headed over to abbott paint in my neighborhood because they are about the friendliest shop i know of (they welcome dogs!) and they sell benjamin moore paint, which (along with valspar) is my favorite line of paint. the color selection is amazing.

i know that a lot of people buy small quantities of specific colors and paint bits on each wall, but i am less scientific. i grab a couple swatches of the colors i’m interested in (the ones i brought home are above) and when i get home, i tape them together to make a larger swath of color and stick them under the woodwork around the room. i move my swatch clumps to each wall and look at them under a lot of lighting conditions. some colors can be immediately discounted, which makes it easy.

for me, the choices were very quickly narrowed to guilford green (the eventual winner!), sweet caroline and hancock green. the others were eliminated because they were too dark, too cool or just too green for the look i had in mind. guilford green ended up taking the prize because it’s a chameleon of sorts: warm enough to make it feel cozy and set off the reds and pinks without too much contrast but still cool enough to make the white woodwork nicely and feel soothing. it sounds crazy, i know, but you’ll understand tomorrow when you see it on the walls!