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Sunday, April 13, 2014

Shades of Gray Paint: Medium Gray


I'm back with another dining room update! You can see the chandelier we installed and the old sideboard we purchased. I decided I wanted to keep with the gray palette of the family room/kitchen and foyer which are all very open and close to the dining room but I wanted a medium shade of gray instead of a light gray. Since the dining room is so open, has lots of white molding and we don't spend time in there every day, I knew it could handle a darker color.

Here is the before with builder beige and the after with Sherwin Williams Gray Matters.


Now, here is how we arrived at the lovely Gray Matters paint color. As I explained in Shades of Gray Paint for light gray, before painting any room we get a ton of paint chips and tape them up on the wall. We look at them in various lights/times of day etc. You don't want your paint color to only look great in natural light.


You also want your paint color to go well with other paint colors nearby so I included that paint chip among the ones I was deciding on (it is the X in the photo below). Of course paint on the wall will look different (sometimes slightly different and sometimes very different) from paint chips. So we select several we that we like (usually 3-5) and get paint samples and paint those on the wall and look at them in different lights/times of day again. We chose Gray Matters, Classic French Gray (which was my favorite on the chip), Cityscape (one shade darker than Gray Matters) and Gray Shingle. They are all numbered below and you can click on the photo to make it larger.



After seeing a few photos on Pinterest, I wanted to also paint the inside rectangles of the coffered ceiling so we tested the colors out there too. Eric w as hesitant about this look so we agreed during painting we would just paint 1 out of the 4 rectangles to ensure we liked it before painting the rest.



We pretty quickly ruled out 2 and 3 for being too dark so then it was down to 1 and 4. Gray Shingle (4) seemed to have a purple or brown undertones depending on the lighting. Since Front Porch, our light gray, was a true gray we liked the idea of more of a true medium gray too so Gray Matters seemed to fit that perfectly and looked great with Front Porch in the adjoining areas as far as we could tell.

So we spent a Saturday painting! We used Gray Matters in flat no-VOC paint. We left the bottom part of the wall under the chair-rail with the picture frame trim all white. We liked the way the painted coffered ceiling looked so we did all 4 rectangles.


There are still a few places to touch-up but other than that we really love the newly painted dining room. Gray Matters was the perfect medium gray paint color for this room.




Here where you see Sherwin Williams Gray Matters in the Dining Room you can also see Sherwin Williams Front Porch in the foyer and how well they flow.




Hooray another builder beige room bites the dust! Anyone else been working on painting projects?

Linking up with: Power of PaintTip Junkie, Inspire Me Monday

9 comments :

  1. Beautiful!! I love everything about your dining room! I am obsessed with grays lately and can't wait to tackle more rooms in my own home.

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  2. I really like this! It looks so fresh and clean. Great job!

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  3. I love this! thank you so much, we live in avery old home and all rooms are seperate" per say but you can see into the next room! our living room is painted front porch and i must say its an odd color but i love it - we have been trying to decide what to paint our dining room and i love th gray matters.

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  4. Gorgeous. i have 20 different colors on my walls and until i saw yours i could not decide, can't wait to get to Sherwin Williams!

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  5. THANK YOU!! For doing all the hard work of finding a TRUE beautiful medium gray. I'm trying to find a color for basically ALL the main living area in my house and I had narrowed down to this color. So glad to see you tested it and it looks great! (Your dining room looks awesome! Love the painted ceiling with the white)

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    1. Did you paint using the grey matters? I am about to paint a portion of my home with it and wondered how you liked it after.

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    2. Yes we did. I still like it even years later. It’s a great medium gray!

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  6. I wish I had seen your pics before we painted.

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