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.
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?
