The month of August started like this:
...and ended like this:

...and this:
...and this:
(This bedroom has all different strengths of Dunn Edwards "Foggy Day," my favorite gray for Max and Elle's rooms HERE and HERE).
And actually, a picture of Dave and I sweating our hearts out would be a perfect compliment to those for August.
And I was dehydrated most of the time (which makes my ears get all plugged up), standing over there with appointment after appointment for plumbing and drywall and trim, etc.
But the paint was the big deal at that point.
I was all set on the white I wanted:
We used it in the house we live in now and I love it. Just the right amount of warmth to not make things too cool-toned.
But the other colors? Well, that was a different story. My "desk" which was actually the dining room table at the time looked like this:
My great friend (and cousin in-law) Sam and her husband came to town and we enlisted their help to sweat it out over there in the heat to figure out some colors.
She had the grand idea to paint foam core boards with the colors we were narrowing from so we could move them around the house to different lighting.
Oh man, let's see if I remember which was which...I think the middle one is "Edgecomb Gray" by Benjamin Moore, and the one on the right is "Revere Pewter" by Benjamin Moore. Everyone was all the rage on Revere Pewter but for whatever reason I didn't like it in our house.
These are her favorites she texted me before she came:
Below is a "Whisper" white cabinet door (not the style we chose, but I used it for color). Next to it is "Galveston Gray" which is an awesome gray for cabinets (we did a couple bathrooms with that), and the last one is what we used on our kitchen island ("Silhouette" by Sherwin Williams).
Here's the "Silhouette" one...I love how those cabinets turned out...I'll post a picture soon.
These were really the main color choices when I finally got things narrowed down:
In the end after all that deliberation, the grand winner of the gray paint for the walls was the one I figured I'd go with in the first place: "Shady" by Dunn Edwards:
It went best with everything all around.
...and the biggest factor is that I have seen it in my friend's house that I love:
And that's worth gold I tell you.
When they primed the walls it was amazing to see the difference of the actual Dunn Edwards gray (the little square on the bottom right) and color matches from other brands (whole wall and small square on the left):
I am happy all these trial colors are now gathering dust in the corner of my garage.
Now if we can just get it all painted.
Man a lot of painting goes into a house...all the trim and doors and all that jazz on top of the walls...