Two New Living Room Paint Colors

I’ll tell you what…Glancing back and forth between the first and second photos of today’s post gives me so much satisfaction. I will never, ever get over the power of paint! Let me back up a second, though. When we moved into our retro ranch back in November of last year, we were surprised to find that we actually didn’t mind the pistachio green living room paint color that we had inherited from the previous homeowners. It went pretty well with our existing green couch and all of my houseplants, so we decided not to touch it for a bit. You can see the color below before we moved our furniture in (see it with furniture on my Instagram feed here).

I’m sure you can tell from those photos above that the color was a little bit on the oversaturated side (click here for a color match that looks similar to me if you like it). My initial thought was that the green felt very true to the 1960s style of our home, but I ended up finding very old photos of the house from a previous listing online, and realized that the green was anything but original. In fact, the room was first painted a beige cream color to match the trim work. After finding out that the paint wasn’t actually from the 1960s, my opinion started to shift ever so slightly.

The other thing that rocked the boat for me was the fact that John and I had been hard at work painting just about every other room in the house around the living room. We were slowly putting our stamp on the house with the paint colors we actually wanted to use, and our whole home color palette was emerging with each painting project that we completed. The more color we added, the less that green coordinated, so I ultimately decided it was time to change it.

John pushed back pretty hard at first when I brought up the idea of painting over the green, but the more I explained to him that the green just wasn’t a good fit with our big picture plans, the more willing he was to give repainting a go. Happily, now that the project is finished he loves the new paint colors I chose and doesn’t miss the old green color one bit. I couldn’t agree more!

After looking through multiple paint swatches picked up at Sherwin-Williams, I decided on a light neutral tone called “Origami White” for the majority of the room. I had initially planned on painting the entire room that color, but I just recently completed a wallpapering project in the entry, and I felt like we needed a contrasting color on the fireplace wall to balance things out (I’m hiding most of the wallpaper for now until the official reveal, but you can see a big sneak peek of it below).

I happened to get a promotional email from Sherwin-Williams about their color of the month, “Homburg Gray,” and I loved the look of it so much that I decided to grab it for our feature wall without even testing it. Now that it’s finished, the rich, dark painted fireplace wall is actually my favorite part of the space, so I’m really glad I decided to spontaneously go bold. Let me know what you think of our new paint colors in the comments! Would you have left the green, or are you as excited about our new paint as we are?