When Even The Paint Fan Doesn’t Have Enough Colors… *

* The alternative titles to this post are: “More Of My House…” or “Please Excuse My Bad Camera Phone Photos.”

I’ve been waiting to repaint my son’s room until he either identified a color he preferred OR came out on the other side of a throwing-things-at-the-wall phase. Apparently the joke’s on me because he really isn’t that bad about throwing things and he recently identified his color preference: traffic cone orange. No thanks, mini man. I guess it’s time for me to get to it. 

So light yellow-ey green it is! Or “wasabi.” Or “avocado.” Or “light yellow-ey green.” After a weekend of testing, here’s my selection. 

Which one you ask? Well, that’s the thing. I love the deeper shade, Pale Avocado. But it’s too deep. It’s especially too deep because we rent our lovely condo and our landlord is the most fantastic of landlords and not only painted our place for us, but seems to value my professional opinion and enjoy our color selections. As such, we want them to remain non-offensive, neutral, pretty, and widely appealing. So no to the “pale” avocado…which is not pale at all.

My solution was fairly simple, but one that you might not know about. I went to the Benjamin Moore up the street and asked them to do a custom color between Rainforest Dew (2146-50) and Pale Avocado (2146-40). What they do is use the light base color and instead of mixing 100% of the pigment they use for Rainforest Dew, they mix in 150% of that pigment. Because colors on the same card are all the same hue (color) in different values (degrees of lightness and darkness) there is no chance that the undertones will change; the result will be every-so-slightly more dramatic than the baby green that Rainforest Dew is. The result? (and now, you really have to excuse my camera phone photo AND the fact that I’ve hung nothing in the walls yet):

I love it! Not too light, not too green, and equally appropriate for a two year old as it is for a 30-something’s office. Which some day very very far from today, it will likely be.

What do you think? My son’s coming around. I suppose it’s the next best choice after “o-nage!” (which adult humans pronounce as “orange”).

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