I can hardly believe that it’s been over two months since my last update on the 18th Century Colonial Renovation we’ve been following! The good news is that progress has not stopped. The bad news is that it is moving a lot slower than expected, and that is largely due to the fact that this is the hard part, picking paint and tile. But since we’ve last checked in, all of the baseboard molding has been put in, light fixtures have been installed in several rooms, the kitchen cabinets have been assembled, but not installed, and the kitchen floor has been laid.

But, back to picking paint colors. We found some amazing grass cloth wallpaper (above) in cream for the living room and blue for a yet to be determined place at LooLoo Design for an equally amazing price. The cream will go above a chair rail in the living room and we’ve found a few shades of creamy white for the trim throughout the house that we think will work great with it. In the dining room (top) the color choices are in the colonial blue range which look really lovely with the grass cloth in the living room.

The 2nd bath which will be for a little boy and guests is going to be a soft, but rich blue. At the moment, we’re leaning towards the one on the far left top.

The master bedroom is proving to be the most difficult at the moment. The goal is a gray with a hint of lavender, but at the moment everything is looking a little too lavender. Unfortunately, this picture doesn’t quite do the colors justice.

And for the little boy’s room, a fireman theme it is. There will be a chair rail in this room so that the entire room is not bright red. The debate is how red is too red and will it be over-stimulating. I say if you go red, go all the way and am pushing for the bottom one, a nice deep, rich red.

A few things that have worked well here for helping pick colors. Always write the name of the color in pencil on the wall next to its swatch. We found that the paint samples we put on the wall really dried to exactly the same color as the paint chip from the store so if you don’t feel like you need to see it in a larger swatch, save the money and don’t buy the sample paint.

Another thing that my sister has done is gone around and taken pictures of the items in her current house and started storyboards for each room so that she can look at the items with the paint chips. It doesn’t have to be fancy. She just printed them out on copy paper and cut and pasted them onto another sheet of copy paper, but she has a sense of how all the primary pieces in the room are going to look tonally together and with the paint colors.