Aaand...the results!

Here we are! Drumroll....

I went with Glidden Olivewood for the living room. The other greys just seemed too purpleish or tannish. This came out way more taupey than I'd wanted it to be, but in the end I was just as happy with it. It's warmer and a little less modern than I would've gone with.

I was concerned about the contrast between the living room against the dining nook's blue. Turns out I had nothing to worry about!

I fell in love with this dark color (I think it was Glidden Dark Olive) but was a little scared of doing the entire office with it, since it doesn't get as much sun, even though we have a glass door leading to the garden. So I decided on one accent wall, and doing the rest in the same Olivewood as the living room.

And my favorite, the dining nook, in Glidden's Tropical Lagoon. The Robins Egg blue was just a tad too aqua, and this came out the perfect aqua blue, sort of like a Moroccan jewel.

Compare that with the original pics from 2 posts ago. We sunk in an extra few hundred bucks to ask the landlord to repaint over the nasty yellowish off-white color they'd chosen, but it was well worth it (even though they only let us do 2 rooms). I made nice with the paint guy and got him to repaint all the trim a pure bright white for nicer contrast, and asked for a white with a slight grey tint in the bedroom. Bringing people donuts does wonders.

A New Coat of Paint

A new coat of paint can work wonders for even the dingiest of apartments. It didn't help that the last tenant here not only left a crapload of her stuff in our new pad, she also was a HEAVY smoker. Meaning, the walls were covered in a yellowish, stinky film of stains, and the heavy odor of stale smoke greeted you as you walked through the doors.

My fiance has a perpetually stuffy nose, so this didn't bother him much, but I couldn't bear the sight of those gross, old-looking walls and smoke clinging to the insides of this place, so I asked our new landlord for a fresh new coat of paint. Unfortunately, she was going to paint it the same off-white-kinda-yellow paint, which did NOT work for me, nosir, so I begged to get some colors in there.

I was limited to Glidden paints because of the amount of money they wanted to spend (or rather, not spend) on my new color dalliance, but I did the best I could given Glidden's limited selections.

First off, my latest obsession is finding the right shade of grey to paint a living room. LA is rife with these faux fireplaces, which some people find tacky, but I--coming from New York City, where everything's cramped and people live with bathtubs in their kitchen--find them kind of cute, even if non-functional. In particular, white fireplaces against a grey wall--swoon! But there are so many shades of grey out there--some with tan undertones, others with blueish/purpleish undertones. And the paint chip you choose in the store can look tooootally different when it's splashed across your wall and in the sunlight of your living room.

Here's my old place. I used Behr Silver Screen.

Before

After:

It's a little bit blown out here by the sunlight, but you can see the difference.

You can see it better here, if you can pry your eyes away from Mila Kunis's hot bod on the cover of GQ. It turned out way bluer than I expected it to in the sunlight, but was nice and grey in artificial light. For my new place, I decided to go with a tanner undertone, something closer to Behr's Dolphin Fin.

Next post: See how the Glidden worked out!