The perfect green.

For the past two weeks, we've been going back and forth to Home Depot to buy little containers of paint color samples, trying to find the right color for our living room. When we bought this house, the living room was painted a very dark green.... not exactly my color in the first place, and it was the one room that I wanted most to change. But we lived with it for a good long while... until I started my painting frenzy the week after New Year's.

Picking the ivory beige for the upstairs rooms was easy..... a soft beige has always been my favorite neutral for walls. But finding a nice happy green for that living room has been a lesson in patience. Time after time, we thought we had the color..... the sample card seemed to be the perfect shade..... the small jar of paint looked just fine.... but once we put it on the wall in the living room, "Sweet Spiceberry" turned into "Sour Bloodberry" as soon as the sun went down. We went through greens, mauves, burgundy shades.... nothing seemed to work. We even tried a taupe/beige in that room, which was awful. Paint that looked so promising in the sunlight turned horrible when we turned on the overhead lights after dark.

Finally, one day last week, I took one of the throw pillows to Home Depot with us..... in that pillow were shades of green and burgundy and gold.... surely we could find the correct shade of one of those colors? The paint guy at Home Depot knew us by that time.... he had mixed up about ten sample containers of paint for us. Each time we went in there, we told him "this is the one." It was never the one.

So in we walked the other day with our pillow and a computer photo of our living room.... my husband goes to the wall of paint samples... the paint guy says hello to us, takes one look at the pillow and the picture, and then he takes some paint color cards out of his pocket, picks one and says "This here's your color." He pointed to a shade of green called "Promenade." It was a soft shade of green... rich without being too dark, vibrant without looking like a leprechaun tossed a zillion shamrocks against the wall.

Could that possibly be our color? Could the paint guy at Home Depot have picked out a color for us in less than 20 seconds while we've been ankle-deep in sample cards for the past two weeks? We bought a sample container of "Promenade." When we got home I put it on the living room wall, next to the patchwork quilt of the other eight colors.... "Promenade" was indeed the perfect color. Give me a blessed break.

My husband went back to Home Depot last night for two gallons of this perfectly soft shade of green. I painted the first wall this morning, covering up all the sample squares of burgundy and mauves, and the assorted putrid shades of green that we tried. The new Promenade paint has dried..... I have put back the furniture and pictures on that first wall.... everything looks beautiful..... the paint guy was right-- This here is your color.

I'll be painting the living room for the rest of the week...... one wall at a time..... taking down pictures and moving furniture away from one wall each day. That dark unhappy shade of green that was here will soon be a memory.